Sharp and laterally constrained multitrace impedance inversion based on blocky coordinate descent

Seismic impedance inversion is a well-known method used to obtain the image of subsurface geological structures. Utilizing the spatial coherence among seismic traces, the laterally constrained multitrace impedance inversion (LCI) is superior to trace-by-trace inversion and can produce a more realistic image of the subsurface structures. However, when the traces are numerous, it will take great computational cost and a lot of memory to solve the large-scale matrix in the multitrace inversion, which restricts the efficiency and applicability of the existing multitrace inversion algorithm. In addition, the multitrace inversion methods are not only needed to consider the lateral correlation but also should take the constraints in temporal dimension into account. As usual, these vertical constraints represent the stratigraphic characteristics of the reservoir. For instance, total-variation regularization is adopted to obtain the blocky structure. However, it still limits the magnitude of model parameter variation and therefore somewhat distorts the real image. In this paper, we propose two schemes to solve these issues. Firstly, we introduce a fast algorithm called blocky coordinate descent (BCD) to derive a new framework of laterally constrained multitrace impedance inversion. This new BCD-based inversion approach is fast and spends fewer memories. Next, we introduce a minimum gradient support regularization into the BCD-based laterally constrained inversion. This new approach can adapt to sharp layer boundaries and keep the spatial coherence. The feasibility of the proposed method is illustrated by numerical tests for both synthetic data and field seismic data.