Robust estimation of structural orientation parameters and 2D/3D local anisotropic Tikhonov regularization

Abstract

Understanding the orientation of geologic structures is crucial for analyzing the complexity of the earths’ subsurface. For instance, information about geologic structure orientation can be incorporated into local anisotropic regularization methods as a valuable tool to stabilize the solution of inverse problems and produce geologically plausible solutions. We introduce a new variational method that uses the alternating direction method of multipliers within an alternating minimization scheme to jointly estimate orientation and model parameters in 2D and 3D inverse problems. Specifically, our approach adaptively integrates recovered information about structural orientation, enhancing the effectiveness of anisotropic Tikhonov regularization in recovering geophysical parameters. The paper also discusses the automatic tuning of algorithmic parameters to maximize the new method’s performance. Our algorithm is tested across diverse 2D and 3D examples, including structure-oriented denoising and trace interpolation. The results indicate that the algorithm is robust in solving the considered large and challenging problems, alongside efficiently estimating the associated tilt field in 2D cases and the dip, strike, and tilt fields in 3D cases. Synthetic and field examples show that our anisotropic regularization method produces a model with enhanced resolution and provides a more accurate representation of the true structures.