Use of AI Tools in the Application of FWI Techniques to Seismic Data with Variable Topography
FWI; WECI; GCN; Seismic processing
Land seismic data and OBN data have always been acquired in locations with variable topography. Performing inversion with these data using FWI (Full Waveform Inversion) has always been a challenge, requiring static corrections to make the seismic data appear as if it were acquired on a flat topography, thereby removing the topographic effect. Therefore, in this work, we apply artificial intelligence tools, specifically the automatic differentiation available in the PyTorch framework, to the inversion of seismic data with variable topography, without the need for static corrections. To make this possible, we applied several inversion techniques, zeroing the gradient of the objective function above the topography at each optimization iteration. The inversion method used is FWI, an advanced seismic processing technique that consists of iteratively adjusting an initial velocity model until the synthetic data resembles the observed data. Due to the high nonlinearity of FWI, the optimization process can get stuck in local minima, a phenomenon known as cycle skipping. To mitigate this problem, four strategies were evaluated and compared: conventional FWI, FWI with gradient smoothing, ECI (Envelope Correlation Inversion), GCN (Global Correlation Norm), and WECI (Weighted Envelope-Correlation Inversion). The experiments were conducted on the 1994 BP synthetic velocity model with variable topography, using a 2.5 Hz Ricker wavelet as the seismic source and an array of 795 receivers distributed along the topographic surface. The wave propagator used was DeepWave, integrated into PyTorch, which enabled the automatic calculation of the objective function gradient for updating the velocity model over 250 iterations. The results show that the envelope-based techniques (ECI and WECI) and the global correlation technique (GCN) exhibit lower sensitivity to the cycle skipping problem compared to conventional FWI, demonstrating the potential of these approaches for seismic inversion in scenarios with complex topography.