Application of an unbalanced optimal transport distance and a mixed L1/Wasserstein distance to full waveform inversion

Abstract: Full waveform inversion (FWI) is an important and popular technique in subsurface earth property estimation. However, using the least-squares norm in the misfit function often leads to the local minimum solution of the optimization problem, and this phenomenon can be explained with the cycle-skipping artifact. Several methods that apply optimal transport distances to mitigate the cycle-skipping artifact have been proposed recently. The optimal transport distance is designed to compare two probability measures. To overcome the mass equality limit, we introduce an unbalanced optimal transport (UOT) distance with KullbackLeibler divergence to balance the mass difference. Also, a mixed L1/Wasserstein distance is constructed that can preserve the convex properties with respect to shift, dilation, and amplitude change operation. An entropy regularization approach and scaling algorithms are used to compute the distance and the gradient efficiently. Two strategies of normalization methods that transform the seismic signals into non-negative functions are provided. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the new method.