Full-Waveform Inversion attempts to estimate a high-resolution model of the Earth by inverting all the seismic data. This procedure fails if the Earth model contains high-contrast bodies such as salt. These bodies are important for hydrocarbon exploration. We propose a parametric level-set method to estimate these geometries by incorporating prior information about their properties. Tests on a suite of idealized salt geometries show that the proposed method is stable against a modest amount of noise.

This presentation is part of Minisymposium “MS67 - Advances and new directions in seismic imaging and inversion (3 parts)”
organized by: Mauricio Sacchi (University of Alberta) , Sergey Fomel (University of Texas, Austin) , Laurent Demanet (MIT ) .

Authors:

Ajinkya Kadu (Utrecht University )

Tristan van Leeuwen (Utrecht University)

Wim Mulder (Shell Global Solutions)

Keywords:

image reconstruction, image segmentation, inverse problems, level-set method, nonlinear optimization, partial differential equation models, seismic imaging