Migration‐based traveltime waveform inversion of 2-D simple structures: A synthetic example

Migration‐based traveltime (MBTT) formulation provides algorithms for automatically determining background velocities from full‐waveform surface seismic reflection data using local optimization methods. In particular, it addresses the difficulty of the nonconvexity of the least‐squares data misfit function. The method consists of parameterizing the reflectivity in the time domain through a migration step and providing a multiscale representation for the smooth background velocity. We present an implementation of the MBTT approach for a 2-D finite‐difference (FD) full‐wave acoustic model. Numerical analysis on a 2-D synthetic example shows the ability of the method to find much more reliable estimates of both long and short wavelengths of the velocity than the classical least‐squares approach, even when starting from very poor initial guesses. This enlargement of the domain of attraction for the global minima of the least‐squares misfit has a price: each evaluation of the new objective function requires, besides the usual FD full‐wave forward modeling, an additional full‐wave prestack migration. Hence, the FD implementation of the MBTT approach presented in this paper is expected to provide a useful tool for the inversion of data sets of moderate size.