9 July 2018

In the field of seismic imaging, full waveform inversion has become one of the key techniques to provide high resolution quantitative estimation of subsurface mechanical parameters such as wave velocities, density, attenuation, or anisotropy parameters. Recent success stories have led both the academy and industry to investigate this technique. Its applicability is however still limited for exploration targets, mostly because of the lack of low frequencies in the data which makes it difficult to correctly interpret the kinematic attributes of the wavefield. Mitigating this issue is the motivation of the work proposed in this presentation. The strategy we present uses a new distance function between observed and calculated data, based on the optimal transport theory. This new distance provides a more convex misfit function: we show on several synthetic examples how this could help to make full waveform inversion a more robust and powerful tool.

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