Combined non-convex second-order total variation with overlapping group sparsity for full waveform inversion

Full waveform inversion (FWI) can provide an accurate velocity model by matching observed and simulated seismograms. Mathematically, FWI is a highly ill-posed inverse problem that the observed data are independent of the model and cannot be inverted accurately. For a stable and reasonable inversion, proper regularization methods have to be taken into account. We propose a novel composite regularization for frequency-domain FWI problem, which uses a non-convex second-order total variation (TV) term and an overlapping group sparse TV (OGS-TV) regularization term. Compared with the conventional TV regularization, our method has better accuracy and robustness, and could effectively make use of the sparsity in the velocity model. Furthermore, the alternating direction multiplier algorithm with the adaptive selection of the penalty parameters is developed to solve this composite constraint problem, which can improve the stability of the FWI process. To illustrate the superior method both visually and quantitatively, we experimentally compare the proposed method with the conventional TV regularized FWI and the second-order total generalized variation regularized FWI and overlapping group sparsity regularized FWI on the well-known geological models.