Anisotropic Waveform Inversion with Model Styling

We develop a gradient computation for recovering anisotropic parameters associated with tilted-transverse isotropy (TTI) in full-waveform inversion (FWI). Our treatment is based on adjoint state theory and pseudoanalytic TTI wave propagation. The method provides reasonable estimates for anisotropic parameter updates and we observe that the migrated images for both the synthetic and real data show improvements with the inverted anisotropic parameters. However, due to the huge null space associated with the inversion we occasionally obtain parameters that are not in line with our understanding of the geology. To overcome this, we introduce a priori information within our inversion via dip annihilation filters. The introduction of this model styling goal within our inversion not only makes the results aesthetically pleasing but also in accordance with our physical intuition about the model. We illustrate our method with the help of a synthetic 3D example.