Velocity Model Building and Editing with Guided Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel framework combining diffusion models with inverse problem techniques for improved seismic velocity-model building and editing, demonstrating enhanced realism and robustness in synthetic and field data.

Contribution

It introduces a unified approach integrating learned diffusion priors with structured inverse formulations for seismic velocity-modeling and editing.

Findings

Diffusion-based methods produce sharper velocity structures.

The approach outperforms classical inversion in realism and robustness.

Structural guidance improves inversion accuracy.

Abstract

Velocity-model building is a fundamental component of seismic imaging, yet it remains a challenging inverse problem due to limited data coverage, nonlinearity, and the need to integrate heterogeneous information such as well logs. We introduce a unified framework for velocity-model editing and full velocity-model building that combines learned diffusion priors with structurally preconditioned inverse formulations. A diffusion model trained on high-resolution synthetic velocity examples provides a data-driven prior that is exploited through Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) inversion and guided sampling. For localized editing, the diffusion prior is coupled with a structurally preconditioned Tikhonov well-matching inversion, enabling controlled modification of selected regions while preserving global consistency. For full velocity-model building, we formulate a well-matching inverse problem augmented with imaging-based regularization and solve it using conventional least-squares, the proposed DDIM-guided method, and Diffusion Posterior Sampling (DPS). Synthetic experiments demonstrate that diffusion-based approaches recover sharper and more realistic velocity structures than classical inversion. Field-data applications on the Viking Graben dataset confirm robustness under realistic acquisition conditions. An ablation study highlights the critical role of structural slope guidance in inversion performance. Overall, the proposed framework bridges inverse problems and generative modeling, offering a flexible approach for practical seismic imaging workflows.