Seismic Imaging by Frequency-domain Double-beamforming Full-waveform Inversion

Full waveform inversion is a promising imaging technology to delineate high resolution images of the subsurface, but suffers from intrinsic non-linearities that require adequate preconditioning. In this study, we investigate a frequency-domain double-beamforming full waveform inversion method (DBF-FWI). Objective is to take benefit of the array information through a double-beamforming (double slant-stack) to project the standard point-to-point data to the angles domain on the source and receiver arrays. The DBF procedure allows to improve significantly the signal-to-noise ratio of the DBF data, and the angles domain allows to select arrivals of interest without any time-domain mute. We illustrate on a synthetic example how the combination of DBF and FWI allows to define a new hierarchical level based on angles, which control image resolution, in order to precondition and improve the robustness of FWI.