A Novel Approach to Newtonian Full-Wave Inversion

Summary This paper is devoted to the frequency-domain full-waveform inversion by Newton’s method. We propose a new approach for calculating Newtonian corrections. In some cases, it is much more economical than the standard method based on solving a normal system of equations with a Hessian matrix. Our presentation is based on the complex Helmholtz equation (the acoustic approximation) and the finite-difference discretization. In essence, we replace the dense normal system of equations, which is difficult to precondition with a sparse one. Thus, the outer (Newtonian) iterations coincide in both cases. However, calculation the corrections at each iteration may become much more economical for certain classes of problems. We present some early results obtained with Marmousi model.