Physics-Guided Data-Driven Seismic Inversion: Recent Progress and Future
Opportunities in Full Waveform Inversion
Abstract
The goal of seismic inversion is to obtain subsurface properties from
surface measurements. Seismic images have proven valuable, even crucial,
for a variety of applications, including subsurface energy exploration,
earthquake early warning, carbon capture and sequestration, estimating
pathways of sub-surface contaminant transport, etc. These subsurface
properties (such as wave speed, density, and elastic velocities)
influence the transmission of seismic waves through the subsurface
media, and well-understood physics models (so-called “forward models”)
can be used to predict what surface measurements would be made, for any
given subsurface configuration. Seismic inversion is the inverse
problem: given actual surface measurements, infer what subsurface
configuration would give rise to those measurements. Like most inverse
problems, seismic imaging is ill-posed, meaning many different
subsurface configurations can give rise to the same surface
measurements. Iterative optimization algorithms for the inverse problem
are typically very computationally expensive because they require many
evaluations of the forward model, which is itself computationally
expensive. A further challenge is the different sensitivity of
subsurface properties to the seismic data; density for example is more
difficult to accurately infer than is P-wave velocity. But recent
advances in algorithms and computing provide an opportunity for
remarkable progress in seismic inversion, and efficient solutions to
previously infeasible problems have been obtained using data-driven
approaches (such as the deep learning methods that were developed
primarily for problems in computer vision). The excellent performance of
learning-based methods arises from its ability to exploit large amounts
of high-quality training data, without the need for hand-designed
features. Unlike computer vision, however, seismic inversion is not a
data-rich domain. There is a relatively small amount of field data in
existence due to the high cost of acquisition, and as a result of its
commercial value, a very limited amount is publicly available. To
alleviate the data scarcity issue and improve model generalization,
there has been growing interest in combining physics knowledge with
machine learning for solving seismic inversion problems. This review
will survey methods for incorporating physics knowledge with machine
learning (primarily deep neural networks) to solve computational seismic
inversion problems. We will provide a structured framework of the
existing research in the seismic inversion community, and will identify
technical challenges, insights, and trends.