Ultra-low memory seismic inversion with randomized trace estimation

Abstract

Inspired by recent work on extended image volumes that lays the ground for randomized probing of extremely large seismic wavefield matrices, we present a memory frugal and computationally efficient inversion methodology that uses techniques from randomized linear algebra. By means of a carefully selected realistic synthetic example, we demonstrate that we are capable of achieving competitive inversion results at a fraction of the memory cost of conventional full-waveform inversion with limited computational overhead. By exchanging memory for negligible computational overhead, we open with the presented technology the door towards the use of low-memory accelerators such as GPUs.