AVA inversion of pre-stack seismic data with cross-gradient constraints

Abstract

The ill-posed feature is one basic attribute of geophysical inversion methods. As an example of geophysical inverse problem, AVA (Amplitude variation with incident angle) inversion of pre-stack seismic data is susceptible to noise and uncertainty in the acquisition. To get stable and accurate inversion results, the regularization constraints on model parameter need to be added into the objective function of AVA inversion. In AVA inversion, the most commonly used regularization includes sparsity constraint (e.g. L1-norm regularization, Cauchy regularization) and a priori model parameters constraint, and so forth. However, the existing AVA inversion methods do not consider the structural similarity of different model parameters. All of the different model parameters represent the same underground geological structure, so they should have similar structure. This paper adopts the cross gradient to measure the structural similarity of different model parameters. Next, the cross gradients of different model parameters are added into the objective function of AVA inversion as a regularization term to implement structural similarity constraint. Results of the model numerical tests and real seismic data indicate that the AVA inversion with cross-gradient constraint has higher stability compared to the AVA inversion without structural similarity constraint, especially for the density inversion results.