A General Approach to Seismic Inversion with Automatic Differentiation

Understand

Imaging Earth structure or seismic sources from seismic data involves minimizing a target misfit function, and is commonly solved through gradient-based optimization.

• The adjoint-state method has been developed to compute the gradient efficiently; however, its implementation can be time-consuming and difficult.
• We develop a general seismic inversion framework to calculate gradients using reverse-mode automatic differentiation.
• The central idea is that adjoint-state methods and reverse-mode automatic differentiation are mathematically equivalent.