Time-domain full waveform inversion using instantaneous phase information with damping

In time domain, the instantaneous phase can be obtained from the complex seismic trace using Hilbert transform. The instantaneous phase information has great potential in overcoming the local minima problem and improving the result of full waveform inversion. However, the phase wrapping problem, which comes from numerical calculation, prevents its application. In order to avoid the phase wrapping problem, we choose to use the exponential phase combined with the damping method, which gives instantaneous phase-based multi-stage inversion. We construct the objective functions based on the exponential instantaneous phase, and also derive the corresponding gradient operators. Conventional full waveform inversion and the instantaneous phase-based inversion are compared with numerical examples, which indicates that in the case without low frequency information in seismic data, our method is an effective and efficient approach for initial model construction for full waveform inversion.