An iterative method for 2D inverse scattering problems by alternating reconstruction of medium properties and wavefields: theory and application to the inversion of elastic waveforms

We study a reconstruction algorithm for the general inverse scattering problem based on the estimate of not only medium properties, as in more conventional approaches, but also wavefields propagating inside the computational domain. This extended set of unknowns is justified as a way to prevent local minimum stagnation, which is a common issue for standard methods. At each iteration of the algorithm, (i) the model parameters are obtained by solution of a convex problem, formulated from a special bilinear relationship of the data with respect to properties and wavefields (where the wavefield is kept fixed), and (ii) a better estimate of the wavefield is calculated, based on the previously reconstructed properties. The resulting scheme is computationally convenient since step (i) can greatly benefit from parallelization and the wavefield update (ii) requires modeling only in the known background model, which can be sped up considerably by factorization-based direct methods. The inversion method is successfully tested on synthetic elastic datasets.