Seismic Imaging and Optimal Transport

Abstract: Seismology has been an active science for a long time. It changed character about 50 years ago when the earth's vibrations could be measured on the surface more accurately and more frequently in space and time. The full wave field could be determined, and partial differential equations (PDE) started to be used in the inverse process of finding properties of the interior of the earth. We will briefly review earlier techniques but mainly focus on Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) for the acoustic formulation. FWI is a PDE constrained optimization in which the variable velocity in a forward wave equation is adjusted such that the solution matches measured data on the surface. The minimization of the mismatch is usually coupled with the adjoint state method, which also includes the solution to an adjoint wave equation. The least-squares norm is the conventional objective function measuring the difference between simulated and measured data, but it often results in the minimization trapped in local minima. One way to mitigate this is by selecting another misfit function with better convexity properties. Here we propose using the quadratic Wasserstein metric as a new misfit function in FWI. The optimal map defining the quadratic Wasserstein metric can be computed by solving a Monge-Ampere equation. Theorems pointing to the advantages of using optimal transport over the least-squares norm will be discussed, and a number of large-scale computational examples will be presented.