Application of structurally similarity constraints on time-domain elastic full-waveform inversion

This study presents advances in elastic multi-parameter full-waveform inversion (FWI) for near-surface seismic applications. Often various geophysical methods are required in order to retrieve reliable information of the shallow subsurface. This arises from the non-linear nature of these techniques, but also due to the various sensitivities of each method to specific structures or weathering conditions of the subsurface. In this study we develop a time-domain elastic FWI including a regularisation to enforce structural similarity between the seismic velocities. By using an eight grid-point stencil, we accurately map variations from P- to S-wave velocity models. In a 2D synthetic experiment we show how by structurally constraining FWI, we can significantly improve the subsurface model reconstruction.