Image-domain full waveform inversion: Field data example

The main difficulty with the data-domain full waveform inversion (FWI) is that it tends to get stuck in the local minima associated with the waveform misfit function. This is the result of cycle skipping which degrades the low-wavenumber update in the absence of low-frequencies and long-offset data. An image-domain objective function is defined as the normed difference between the predicted and observed common image gathers (CIGs) in the subsurface offset domain. This new objective function is not constrained by cycle skipping at the far subsurface offsets. To test the effectiveness of this method, we apply it to marine data recorded in the Gulf of Mexico. Results show that image-domain FWI is less sensitive to the initial model and the absence of low-frequency data compared with conventional FWI. The liability, however, is that it is almost an order of magnitude more expensive than standard FWI.