Seismic full-waveform inversion (FWI) (Tarantola, 1984) has gained much interest because of its ability to produce highresolution earth models (Vigh and Starr, 2008; Virieux and Operto, 2009). However, the task of accurately recovering the geometry of salt bodies, typically found in geologically complex marine environments like the Gulf of Mexico, still presents a great challenge to FWI. Therefore, the salt geometry often must be manually picked by seismic interpreters, which is not only subjective but also a time-consuming and costly process. Better definition of the salt geometry has been shown to greatly improve imaging in the subsalt sedimentary regions, as shown by Vigh et al. (2010). In this paper, we present an approach to directly invert the geometry of the salt bodies, using FWI, by partitioning the inversion domain into salt and sediment regions and using a level set representation to parameterize the salt geometry.

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