A Parallel Evolution Strategy for Acoustic Full-Waveform Inversion

In this work, we propose another alternative to find an initial velocity model for the acoustic FWI without any physical knowledge. Motivated by the recent growth of high performance computing (HPC), we tackle the high non-linearity of the problem to minimize, using global optimization methods which are easy to parallelize, in particular, evolution strategies. The first contribution adapt evolution strategies to the FWI setting where the cost function evaluation is the most expensive part. The second contribution is the parameterization of the regarded problem, by being able to represent the model, as faithfully as possible, while limiting the number of parameters needed, since each additional parameter is an additional dimension to explore. The last contribution is to propose a highly parallel evolution strategy adapted to the FWI setting. The initial results on the Salt Dome velocity model using low frequency range, show that great improvement can be done to automate the FWI.