Source Estimation for Frequency-domain FWI with Robust Penalties

Source estimation is an essential component of full waveform inversion. In the standard frequency- domain formulation, there is closed form solution for the the optimal source weights, which can thus be cheaply estimated on the fly. A growing body of work underscores the importance of robust modeling for data with large outliers or artifacts that are not captured by the forward model. Ef- fectively, the least-squares penalty on the residual is replaced by a robust penalty, such as Huber, Hybrid l1-l2 or Student’s t. As we will demonstrate, it is essential to use the same robust penalty for source estimation. In this abstract, we present a general approach to robust waveform inversion with robust source estimation. In this general formulation, there is no closed form solution for the optimal source weights so we need to solve a scalar optimization problem to obtain these weights. We can efficiently solve this optimization problem with a Newton-like method in a few iterations. The computational cost involved is of the same order as the usual least-squares source estimation procedure. We show numerical examples illustrating robust source estimation and robust waveform inversion on synthetic data with outliers.