Implementing bound constraints and total-variation regularization in extended full waveform inversion with the alternating direction method of multiplier: application to large contrast media

International audienceFull-waveform inversion (FWI) is a waveform matching procedure, which can provide a subsurface model with a wavelength-scale resolution. However, this high resolution makes FWI prone to cycle skipping, which drives the inversion to a local minimum when the initial model is not accurate enough. Other sources of non-linearities and ill-posedness are noise, uneven illumination, approximate wave physics and parameter cross-talks. All these sources of error require robust and versatile regularized optimization approaches to mitigate their imprint on FWI while preserving its intrinsic resolution power. To achieve this goal, we implement bound constraints and total-variation (TV) regularization in the so-called frequency-domain wavefield reconstruction inversion (WRI) with the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). In the ADMM framework, WRI relies on an augmented Lagrangian function, a combination of penalty and Lagrangian functions, to extend the FWI search space by relaxing the wave-equation constraint during early iterations. Moreover, ADMM breaks down the joint wavefield reconstruction plus parameter-estimation problem into a sequence of two linear subproblems, whose solutions are coordinated to provide the solution of the global problem. The decomposability of ADMM is further exploited to interface in a straightforward way bound constraints and TV regularization with WRI via variable splitting and proximal operators. The resilience of our regularized WRI formulation to cycle skipping and noise as well as its resolution power are illustrated with two targets of the large-contrast BP salt model. Starting from a 3Hz frequency and a crude initial model, the extended search space allows for the reconstruction of the salt and subsalt structures with a high fidelity. The TV regularization filters out the imprint of ambient noise and artefacts associated with multiscattering and Gibbs effects, while fostering large-contrast reconstruction. Compared to other TV-regularized WRI implementations, the proposed method is easy to tune due to its moderate sensitivity to penalty parameters and does not require a prior guess of the TV-norm ball