Source Estimation for Wavefield Reconstruction Inversion

Abstract

Wavefield reconstruction inversion is a new approach to waveform based inversion that helps overcome the ‘cycle skipping’ problem. However, like most waveform based inversion methods, wavefield reconstruction inversion also requires good source wavelets. Without correct source wavelets, wavefields cannot be reconstructed correctly and the velocity model cannot be updated correctly neither. In this work, we propose a source estimation method for wavefield reconstruction inversion based on the variable projection method. In this method, we reconstruct wavefields and estimate source wavelets simultaneously by solving an extended least-squares problem, which contains source wavelets. This approach does not increase the computational cost compared to conventional wavefield reconstruction inversion. Numerical results illustrates with our source estimation method we are able to recover source wavelets and obtain inversion results that are comparable to results obtained with true source wavelets.