Seismic Full-waveform Inversion of Salt Geometry Using a Level Set Approach

SUMMARY An accurate definition of geometry of complex subsurface bodies, such as salt intrusions, is crucial for imaging below such targets. Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is a method for building high-resolution seismic velocity models from nonlinear iterative minimization of the misfit between observed and synthetic seismic data. The ability of FWI to accurately recover the geometry of salt bodies can be limited by several factors, with the lack of low frequencies in the data being one of them, thus, requiring the salt geometry to be often manually interpreted. In this paper we modify the FWI algorithm to use a level set representation to parameterize and invert for the geometry of salt bodies, without adding to computational cost of FWI.