Mitigating local minima in full-waveform inversion by expanding the search space

Wave equation based inversions, such as full-waveform inversion and reverse-time migration, are challenging because of their computational costs, memory requirements and reliance on accurate initial models. To confront these issues, we propose a novel formulation of wave equation based inversion based on a penalty method. In this formulation, the objective function consists of a data-misfit term and a penalty term, which measures how accurately the wavefields satisfy the wave equation. This new approach is a major departure from current formulations where forward and adjoint wavefields, which both satisfy the wave equation, are correlated to compute updates for the unknown model parameters. Instead, we carry out the inversions over two alternating steps during which we first estimate the wavefield everywhere, given the current model parameters, source and observed data, followed by a second step during which we update the model parameters, given the estimate for the wavefield everywhere and the source. Because the inversion involves both the synthetic wavefields and the medium parameters, its search space is enlarged so that it suffers less from local minima. Compared to other formulations that extend the search space of wave equation based inversion, our method differs in several aspects, namely (i) it avoids storage and updates of the synthetic wavefields because we calculate these explicitly by finding solutions that obey the wave equation and fit the observed data and (ii) no adjoint wavefields are required to update the model, instead our updates are calculated from these solutions directly, which leads to significant computational savings. We demonstrate the validity of our approach by carefully selected examples and discuss possible extensions and future research.