Estimation of acoustic macro models using a genetic full-waveform inversion: Applications to the Marmousi model

We present a stochastic full-waveform inversion that uses genetic algorithms (GA FWI) to estimate acoustic macro-models of the P-wave velocity field. Stochastic methods such as GA severely suffer the curse of dimensionality, meaning that they require unaffordable computer resources for inverse problems with many unknowns and expensive forward modeling. To mitigate this issue, we propose a two-grid technique, that is, a coarse grid to represent the subsurface for the GA inversion and a finer grid for the forward modeling. We applied this procedure to invert synthetic acoustic data of the Marmousi model. We show three different tests. The first two tests use as prior information a velocity model derived from standard stacking velocity analysis and differ only for the parameterization of the coarse grid. Their comparison shows that a smart parameterization of the coarse grid may significantly improve the final result. The third test uses a linearly increasing 1D velocity model as prior information, a layer-stripping procedure, and a large number of model evaluations. All the three tests return velocity models that fairly reproduce the long-wavelength structures of the Marmousi. First-break cycle skipping related to the seismograms of the final GA-FWI models is significantly reduced compared to the one computed on the models used as prior information. Descent-based FWIs starting from final GA-FWI models yield velocity models with low and comparable model misfits and with an improved reconstruction of the structural details. The quality of the models obtained by GA FWI + descent-based FWI is benchmarked against the models obtained by descent-based FWI started from a smoothed version of the Marmousi and started directly from the prior information models. The results are promising and demonstrate the ability of the two-grid GA FWI to yield velocity models suitable as input to descent-based FWI.