Frequency extension and robust full waveform inversion based on nth power operation

The conventional full-waveform inversion (FWI) often minimizes the objective function using some local optimization algorithms. As a result, when the initial model is not good enough, the inversion process will drop into a local minimum. The low-frequency components contained in seismic data are of vital importance for reducing the initial model dependence and mitigating the cycle-skipping phenomenon of FWI. In this research, a frequency extension method using the nth power operation is proposed, which compresses the seismic data in time domain and extends their frequency band. Based on this, we construct a new objective function using the nth power wavefeld and derive the corresponding gradient formula. The new objective function shows better property to overcome local minimum than the conventional one. When conduct inversion, we can invert from high-order to low-order successively, which is a new multiscale strategy. Since seismic data is more sensitive to source wavelet errors after high-order operation, we make the method more robust by proposing a source-independent method to mitigate the efects of source wavelet inaccuracy. After that, we extend the proposed method to encoded multisource waveform inversion. The numerical examples on the Marmousi model demonstrate that the proposed method can efectively mitigate the cycle-skipping of FWI, and it also has good anti-noise property.