Two-dimensional unwrapped phase inversion with damping and a Gaussian filter

Phase wrapping is one of main causes of the local minima problem in waveform inversion. However, the unwrapping process for 2D phase maps that includes singular points (residues) is complicated and does not guarantee unique solutions. We employ an exponential damping to eliminate the residues in the 2D phase maps, which makes the 2D phase unwrapping process easy and produce a unique solution. A recursive inversion process using the damped unwrapped phase provides an opportunity to invert for smooth background updates first, and higher resolution updates later as we reduce the damping. We also apply a Gaussian filter to the gradient to mitigate the edge artifacts resulting from the narrow shape of the sensitivity kernels at high damping. Numerical examples demonstrate that our unwrapped phase inversion with damping and a Gaussian filter produces good convergent results even for a 3Hz single frequency of Marmousi dataset and with a starting model far from the true model.