Multiparameter shallow-seismic waveform inversion based on the Jensen–Shannon divergence

Abstract

SUMMARY Seismic full-waveform inversion (FWI) or waveform inversion (WI) has gained extensive attention as a cutting-edge imaging method, which is expected to reveal the high-resolution images of complex geological structures. In this paper, we regard each 1-D signal in the inversion system as a 1-D probability distribution, then use the Jensen–Shannon divergence from information theory to measure the discrepancy between the predicted and observed signals, and finally implement a novel 2-D multiparameter shallow-seismic WI (MSWI). Essentially, the novel approach achieves an implicit weighting along the time-axis for each 1-D adjoint source defined by the classical WI (CWI), thus enhancing the extra illumination for a deeper medium compared with the CWI. By evaluating the inversion results of the two-layer model and fault model, the reconstruction accuracy for S-wave velocity and density of the new method is increased by about 30 and 20 per cent compared with that of the CWI under the same conditions, respectively. The reconstruction performance for P-wave velocity of these two methods is almost equal. In addition, the new 2-D MSWI is also resilient to white Gaussian noise in the data. Numerically, the inversion system has almost the strongest sensitivities to the S-wave velocity and density, performing the poorest sensitivity to the P-wave velocity. Finally, we test the novel method with a detection case for a power tunnel.