Simultaneous multitrace impedance inversion with transform-domain sparsity promotion

Abstract

The impedance inversion technique plays a crucial role in seismic reservoir properties prediction. However, most existing impedance inversion methods often suffer from spatial discontinuities and instability because each vertical profile is processed independently in the inversion. We tested a transform-domain sparsity promotion simultaneous multitrace impedance inversion method to address this issue. The approach was implemented through minimizing a data misfit term and a transform-domain sparsity constraint term that incorporates the (2D or 3D) structural information into the inversion processing. A 2D synthetic data example was applied to mainly explain the roles of the transform-domain sparsity constraint. We determined that the transform-domain sparsity constraint can help in stabilizing the inversion, reducing the influence of high-wavenumber noise on the inverted result, and exploring spatial continuities of structures. Furthermore, a 3D field data example was used to examine the effectiveness of the proposed method for dealing with the real data and to reveal the difference between the results from the 3D simultaneous inversion and the section-by-section inversion. We found that the inverted results roughly matched a low-pass-filtered version of impedance curves derived from well log data. Also, it has been demonstrated that the 3D simultaneous inversion technique provided a better estimation than the section-by-section inversion technique in terms of guaranteeing more spatial continuities of geologic features in the impedance model.