Focusing inversion of geophysical data

Oleg Portniaguine and Michael S. Zhdanov

University of Utah, Department of Geology and Geophysics, Salt Lake City, UT 84112 USA. e-mail:mzhdanov@mines.utah.edu

Abstract

One of the critical problems in inversion of geophysical data is developing a stable inverse problem solution which at the same time can resolve complicated geological structures. The traditional way to obtain stable solution is based on maximum smoothness solutions. This approach, however, provides smoothed ''unfocused'' images of real geological structures. Recently a new approach to reconstruction of images has been developed based on total variational (TV) stabilizing functional. However, in geophysical applications it still produces distorted images. In this paper we develop a new technique to solve this problem which we call focusing inversion of geophysical data. It is based on specially selected stabilizing functionals which minimize the area where strong model parameters variations and discontinuity occur. We call this new functional a minimum gradient support (MGS) functional. We demonstrate that MGS functional in combination with the penalization function help to generate more clear and focused images for geological structures than conventional maximum smoothness or TV functionals. The method also reconstructs the sharp boundaries between the geological structures with the different physical properties. The method has been successfully tested on synthetic models and as applied to real gravity data from Penasquito site provided by Kennecott Corporation.


raeg98@tansa.kumst.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Last modified: Tue Oct 6 09:55:44 1998