Data-driven multichannel poststack seismic impedance inversion via patch-ordering regularization

Seismic acoustic impedance inversion plays an important role in reservoir prediction. However, single-trace inversion methods often suffer from spatial discontinuities and instability due to poor-quality seismic records with spatially variable signal-to-noise ratios or missing traces. The specified hyperparameters for seismic inversion cannot be suitable to all seismic traces and subsurface structures. In addition, conventional multichannel inversion imposes lateral continuity with a prespecified mathematical model. However, the inversion results constrained with specified lateral regularization are inferior when the subsurface situations violate the hypothesis. A data-driven multichannel acoustic impedance inversion method with patch-ordering regularization is introduced, in which the spatial correlation of seismic reflection is used. The method decomposes the seismic profile into patches and constructs the patch-ordering matrix based on the similarity among seismic patches to record the impedance structural extension. So the patch-ordering matrix can record the spatial extension of the acoustic impedance. Then, a simple regularization with difference operators of varying weights can reduce the random noise presented in the inverted impedance profile, stabilize the inversion result, and enhance the spatial continuity of the layer extension. The objective function for multichannel poststack seismic impedance inversion can be constructed by integrating the observed seismic record and the spatial continuity in the form of patch-ordering regularization, and it can be solved effectively with the limited-memory BFGS algorithm. The synthetic and field data tests illustrate the improvement of accuracy and lateral continuity of inverted results with our method, compared to conventional model-based inversion results.