Robust elastic frequency-domain full-waveform inversion using the L1 norm

R. Brossier (1) , S. Operto (1) , J. Virieux (2)

1 GEOAZUR 6526 - Géoazur
2 LGIT - Laboratoire de Géophysique Interne et Tectonophysique

Elastic frequency-domain full-waveform inversion is here applied to a realistic synthetic offshore model to study the behavior of the least-squares and least-absolute-value norms, in the presence of noisy multi-component seis- mic data. As expected, the inversion results show that the L2 norm is highly sensitive to non-Gaussian errors in the data and gives rise to high amplitude artifacts in the reconstructed models. The L1 norm shows more robust be- havior, whatever the noise characteristics, and allows convergence towards acceptable models, for both the compressional-wave and shear-wave velocity models. This study highlights the sensitivity of the full-waveform inversion results for the chosen norm in the case of noisy data. The marginally used L1 norm reveals a robust alternative to the L2 norm for frequency-domain full-waveform inversion of weakly redundant data.

Domaines: Sciences de la Terre; Planète et Univers [physics]

R. Brossier, S. Operto, J. Virieux. Robust elastic frequency-domain full-waveform inversion using the L1 norm. Geophysical Research Letters, 2009, 36, pp.L20310. ⟨10.1029/2009GL039458⟩. ⟨hal-00424198⟩