Improved full-waveform inversion for seismic data in the presence of noise based on the K-support norm

Abstract: Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is known as a seismic data processing method that achieves high-resolution imaging. In the inversion part of the method that brings high resolution in finding a convergence point in the model space, a local numerical optimization algorithm minimizes the objective function based on the norm using the least-square form. Since the norm is sensitive to outliers and noise, the method may often lead to inaccurate imaging results. Thus, a new regulation form with a more practical relaxation form is proposed to solve the overfitting drawback caused by the use of the norm,, namely the K-support norm, which has the form of more reasonable and tighter constraints. In contrast to the least-square method that minimizes the norm, our K-support constraints combine the and the norms. Then, a quadratic penalty method is adopted to linearize the non-linear problem to lighten the computational load. This paper introduces the concept of the K-support norm and integrates this scheme with the quadratic penalty problem to improve the convergence and robustness against background noise. In the numerical example, two synthetic models are tested to clarify the effectiveness of the K-support norm by comparison to the conventional norm with noisy data set. Experimental results indicate that the modified FWI based on the new regularization form effectively improves inversion accuracy and stability, which significantly enhances the lateral resolution of depth inversion even with data with a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).