Enhanced template matching full-waveform inversion

Full-waveform inversion has been demonstrated as a prominent method for high-resolution earth model building and recently became a standard industry workhorse for tackling the most challenging earth model building process in complex geological environment. However, its robustness is often challenged due to the well-known cycle-skipping problem. The most widely adopted approaches often resort to a traveltime-based objective function to mitigate the cycle-skipping problem. Such approaches require a reliable measurement of the traveltime shift between distinct similar events in both the simulated data and the observed data. Limitations on the availability of similar events severely limits the application of those approaches to complex geological environments such as area around salt. In this paper, we proposed a novel enhanced template-matching full-waveform inversion (ETM-FWI) to overcome limitations of conventional traveltime-based objective function. We have demonstrated the new ETM-FWI works well with field data even in the most complicated geological environments, such as the two field data examples shown from the complex salt regions at deep-water Gulf of Mexico.