VelocityGAN: Subsurface Velocity Image Estimation Using Conditional Adversarial Networks

Acoustic-and elastic-waveform inversion is an important and widely used method to reconstruct subsurface velocity image. Waveform inversion is a typical non-linear and ill-posed inverse problem. Existing physics-driven computational methods for solving waveform inversion suffer from the cycle skipping and local minima issues, and not to mention solving waveform inversion is computationally expensive. In this paper, we developed a real-time datadriven technique, VelocityGAN, to accurately reconstruct subsurface velocities. Our VelocityGAN is an end-to-end framework which can generate high-quality velocity images directly from the raw seismic waveform data. A series of experiments are conducted on the synthetic seismic reflection data to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of VelocityGAN. We not only compare it with existing physics-driven approaches but also choose some deep learning frameworks as our data-driven baselines. The experiment results show that VelocityGAN outperforms the physics-driven waveform inversion methods and achieves the state-of-the-art performance among data-driven baselines.