An efficient plug-and-play regularization method for full waveform inversion

Abstract Nonlinear inverse problems arise in various fields ranging from scientific computation to engineering technology. Inverse problems are intrinsically ill-posed, and effective regularization techniques are necessary. The core of a suitable regularization method is to introduce the prior information of the model via an explicit or implicit regularization function. Plug-and-play regularization is a flexible framework that integrates the most effective denoising priors into an iterative algorithm, and it has recently shown great potential in the solution of linear ill-posed problems. Unlike traditional regularization methods, plug-and-play regularization does not require an explicit regularization function to represent the prior information of the model. In this work, by using total variation, block-matching and three-dimensional filtering, and fast and flexible denoising convolutional neural network denoisers, we propose a novel iterative regularization algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers method. The combination of total variation and block-matching three-dimensional filtering regularizers can take advantage of the sparsity and nonlocal similarity in the solution of inverse problems. When combined with traditional and novel regularizers, deep neural networks have been shown to be an effective regularization approach, which can achieve state-of-the-art performance. Finally, we apply the proposed algorithm to the full waveform inversion problem to show the effectiveness of our method. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing inversion methods in terms of quantitative measures and visual perceptual quality.