Full waveform inversion using an automatic directional total variation constraint

Abstract

As full waveform inversion (FWI) is a non-unique and typically ill-posed inversion problem, it needs proper regularization. To optimally include geologic information, we propose full waveform inversion with directional total variation as an L1-norm regularization. We design the directional total variation (TV) operator based on the local dip field, derived from the seismic image, instead of ignoring the local structural direction and only using horizontal/vertical gradients in traditional TV. With a synthetic example with complex structures based on the Marmousi model, we demonstrate that the proposed method is much more effective compared to both FWI without regularization and FWI with conventional TV regularization.