Paper Summary
Full waveform inversion (FWI) with 𝐿𝐿2norm objective function often suffers from cycle skipping that causes the solution to be trapped in a local minimum, usually far from the true model. We introduce a new norm based on the optimal transport theory for measuring the data mismatch to overcome this problem. The new solution uses an exponential encoding scheme and enhances the phase information when compared with the conventional 𝐿𝐿2norm. The adjoint source is calculated trace-wise based on the 1D Wasserstein distance. It uses an explicit solution of the optimal transport over the real line. It results in an efficient implementation with a computational complexity of the adjoint source proportional to the number of shots, receivers and the length of recording time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution by using the Marmousi model. A second example, using the BP 2004 velocity benchmark model, illustrates the benefit of the combination of the new norm and Total Variation (TV) regularization.