A mixin algorithm for geoacoustic inversion

Abstract

Shear wave velocities in the sediment can be inverted by using the dispersion curves of interface wave. It can be done by use of an algorithm based on singular value decomposition (SVD). This method can only invert the shear wave velocities and requires knowledge of the thicknesses and densities of the sediment layers. This paper presents a new algorithm for inversion of geoacoustic parameters based on dispersion curves that we have coined "mixin inversion". Mixin inversion combines SVD and global search using genetic algorithm (GA). The GA searches the depths and densities by doing a shear wave velocity inversion with SVD for each of its parameter values. This algorithm can be applied on cases where the depths, densities and shear wave velocities of the sediments are unknown. The advantage is that it is faster than pure GA since the search space is much smaller and it can be applied on cases where pure SVD inversion fails because necessary information about depths and densities is not known.