A B S T R A C TAlthough Genetic Algorithms have found many successful applications in the field of exploration geophysics, the convergence speed remains a big challenge as Genetic Algorithms usually require a huge amount of fitness function evaluations. In this paper, we propose an efficiency-improved Genetic Algorithm, which has both a good global search capability and a good local search capability, and is also capable of robustly handling the premature convergence challenge commonly seen in linear and directed non-linear optimization methods. In our new genetic algorithm, the global search capability is performed via a modified island model, while the local search capability is provided by a novel self-adaptive differential evolution fine tuning scheme. Premature convergence is dealt with via a local exhaustive search method. We first demonstrate the much improved convergence speed of this efficiency-improved Genetic Algorithm over that of our previously proposed advanced Genetic Algorithm on several multimodal functions. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our efficiency-improved Genetic Algorithm by applying it to a two-dimensional common reflection surface stacking problem, which is a highly nonlinear geophysical optimization problem, to obtain very encouraging results.

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