Viscoacoustic least squares reverse-time migration using L1-2 norm sparsity constraint

Least-squares reverse-time migration (LSRTM) has become an advanced technique for complex structures imaging of the subsurface, as it can provide a higher resolution and more balanced amplitude migrated image than conventional reverse-time migration (RTM). However, the intrinsic attenuation of subsurface introduces amplitude attenuation and phase dispersion of seismic wavefield, which leads to the inverted image kinematically and dynamically inexactitude. Moreover, the imperfect geometry, limited bandwidth of seismic data, and inappropriate modeling kernel etc., would inevitably introduce two side-effects in migrated image, resulting in degradation of LSRTM imaging potential. To alleviate above issues, we present a data-domain sparsity constraint viscoacoustic least-squares reverse-time migration algorithm in this paper. In particular, we utilize the decoupled constant Q fractional Laplacians (DFLs) viscoacoustic wave equation as the modeling kernel to describe the attenuation effects of the subsurface, while a model constraint constructed in the misfit function via L1-2 norm is carried out to clear the migrated artefacts and boost the imaging resolution. Thanks to the excellent performance in sparsity, the drawbacks of unconstraint LSRTM can be effectively mitigated by the L1-2 norm-based regularization. In this paper, we adopt the alternating direction of multipliers method (ADMM) to iteratively address the constrained L1-2 minimization problem by implementing a proximal operator, and three synthetic examples are hired to evaluate the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed strategy. Migration results prove that the proposed scheme can effectively compensate the attenuation effects, improve the resolution, and suppress the migration artifacts of inverted images even in the complex imaging situations.