Deep learning for velocity model building with common-image gather volumes

SUMMARY Subsurface velocity model building is a crucial step for seismic imaging. It is a challenging problem for conventional methods such as full-waveform inversion (FWI) and wave equation migration velocity analysis (WEMVA), due to the highly nonlinear relationship between subsurface velocity values and seismic responses. In addition, traditional FWI and WEMVA methods are often computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose to apply a deep learning technique to construct subsurface velocity models automatically from common-image gather (CIG) volumes. In our method, pairs of synthetic velocity models and CIG volumes are generated to train a convolutional neural network. Our proposed network achieves promising results on different synthetic data sets. The training performance of several commonly used loss functions is also studied.