Regularized Laplace–Fourier-Domain Full Waveform Inversion Using a Weighted l2 Objective Function

Full waveform inversion (FWI) can be applied to obtain an accurate velocity model that contains important geophysical and geological information. FWI suffers from the local minimum problem when the starting model is not sufficiently close to the true model. Therefore, an accurate macroscale velocity model is essential for successful FWI, and Laplace–Fourier-domain FWI is appropriate for obtaining such a velocity model. However, conventional Laplace–Fourier-domain FWI remains an ill-posed and ill-conditioned problem, meaning that small errors in the data can result in large differences in the inverted model. This approach also suffers from certain limitations related to the logarithmic objective function. To overcome the limitations of conventional Laplace–Fourier-domain FWI, we introduce a weighted l2 objective function, instead of the logarithmic objective function, as the data-domain objective function, and we also introduce two different model-domain regularizations: first-order Tikhonov regularization and prior model regularization. The weighting matrix for the data-domain objective function is constructed to suitably enhance the far-offset information. Tikhonov regularization smoothes the gradient, and prior model regularization allows reliable prior information to be taken into account. Two hyperparameters are obtained through trial and error and used to control the trade-off and achieve an appropriate balance between the data-domain and model-domain gradients. The application of the proposed regularizations facilitates finding a unique solution via FWI, and the weighted l2 objective function ensures a more reasonable residual, thereby improving the stability of the gradient calculation. Numerical tests performed using the Marmousi synthetic dataset show that the use of the weighted l2 objective function and the model-domain regularizations significantly improves the Laplace–Fourier-domain FWI. Because the Laplace–Fourier-domain FWI is improved, the frequency-domain FWI, in which the Laplace–Fourier-domain FWI result is used as the starting model, yields inversion result much closer to the true velocity.