Improvement of density inversion efficiency with projected gradient method: Application to FTG data

Abstract

With the development of instruments for measuring Earth's gravity gradient tensor, full tensor gravity (FTG) data can be obtained validly and accurately. The highly precise performance of FTG data ensures that they can play an important role in many domains. Generally, FTG data can be acquired from airborne platform, and large-scale data can be obtained by long term observations. For this type of data, research methods for large data processing are very important. Three-dimensional data inversion is an effective and significant method for the quantitative interpretation of FTG data, which has received much attention. Large-scale data inversion is inevitable, and may consume large amounts of time with increase in the amount of data and model parameters. The main aim of this study is to improve the calculation efficiency of FTG data inversion compared with general conjugate gradient (CG) method. Accordingly, an improved gradient method with projections onto a convex set (the projected gradient method) was applied to accelerate the recovery rate of the sub-surface rock density, and a corresponding preconditioning factor was introduced to further improve the calculation efficiency of inversion. This new projected gradient method can improve the calculation efficiency of large amounts of FTG data, which is very necessary for practical application of FTG data. The application of synthetic FTG data with Gaussian noise and the real data demonstrated the feasibility and application value of the proposed inversion method.