Imaging of elastic seismic data by least‐squares reverse time migration with weighted L2‐norm multiplicative and modified total‐variation regularizations

ABSTRACT Least‐squares reverse time migration has the potential to yield high‐quality images of the Earth. Compared with acoustic methods, elastic least‐squares reverse time migration can effectively address mode conversion and provide velocity/impendence and density perturbation models. However, elastic least‐squares reverse time migration is an ill‐posed problem and suffers from a lack of uniqueness; further, its solution is not stable. We develop two new elastic least‐squares reverse time migration methods based on weighted L2‐norm multiplicative and modified total‐variation regularizations. In the proposed methods, the original minimization problem is divided into two subproblems, and the images and auxiliary variables are updated alternatively. The method with modified total‐variation regularization solves the two subproblems, a Tikhonov regularization problem and an L2‐total‐variation regularization problem, via an efficient inversion workflow and the split‐Bregman iterative method, respectively. The method with multiplicative regularization updates the images and auxiliary variables by the efficient inversion workflow and nonlinear conjugate gradient methods in a nested fashion. We validate the proposed methods using synthetic and field seismic data. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed methods with regularization improve the resolution and fidelity of the migration profiles and exhibit superior anti‐noise ability compared with the conventional method. Moreover, the modified‐total‐variation‐based method has marginally higher accuracy than the multiplicative‐regularization‐based method for noisy data. The computational cost of the proposed two methods is approximately the same as that of the conventional least‐squares reverse time migration method because no additional forward computation is required in the inversion of auxiliary variables.