AccScience Publishing / JSE / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/JSE026120050
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Three-dimensional high-order total variation regularized acoustic impedance inversion for thin coal seam thickness prediction in the Yushe East Area, China

Yinping Dong1,2 ,  Youyi Shen1,2 ,  Zhongbin Tian3,4 ,  Wei Wei1,2 ,  Xiaodong Yang1,2 ,  Yaju Hao5 ,  Peng Zhang5*
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1 Key Laboratory of Monitoring and Protection of Natural Resources in Mining Cities, Ministry of Natural Resources, Jinzhong, Shanxi, China
2 Coal Geological Geophysical Exploration Surveying and Mapping Institute of Shanxi Province Co., Ltd., Jinzhong, Shanxi, China
3 Shanxi Provincial Geological Prospecting Bureau, Taiyuan, Shanxi, China
4 School of Resources and Geosciences, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, Jiangsu, China
5 School of Geophysics and Space Exploration, East China University of Technology, Nanchang, Jiangxi, China
JSE, 026120050 https://doi.org/10.36922/JSE026120050
Received: 20 March 2026 | Revised: 14 April 2026 | Accepted: 16 April 2026 | Published online: 20 May 2026
© 2026 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
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Abstract

Conventional three-dimensional (3D) impedance inversion methods exhibit poor lateral continuity during the inversion of thin coal seams, making it difficult to effectively preserve the lateral structural characteristics of the coal seams, which in turn affects the accurate prediction of the thickness and extent of thin coal seams. To address this issue, we propose a 3D high-order total variation (TV) regularized impedance inversion method. This method introduces high-order TV regularization constraints in both the inline and crossline directions to enhance the spatial continuity of the inversion results. The inversion objective function is solved in the frequency domain using the split-Bregman method, thereby improving computational efficiency for large-scale 3D matrix operations compared to time-domain approaches. The test results of the 3D overthrust model show that the 3D high-order TV constraint can effectively improve the transverse continuity and structural retention ability of the inversion results. The practical application results on the 3D seismic data of Yushe East Exploration Area in Shanxi Province show that, compared to the model-based inversion method in STRATA, the proposed method achieves higher vertical resolution and better lateral continuity, and can clearly depict the low-impedance characteristics of the No. 15 coal seam. Based on this, the error between the predicted coal seam thickness and the well-logging interpretation thickness is less than 8.8%, indicating that the proposed method maintains good stability and predictive capability even under limited well-control conditions.

Keywords
Acoustic impedance inversion
Three-dimensional total variation regularization
High-order difference operator
Coal seam thickness prediction
Lateral continuity
Funding
This study was supported by the Shanxi Provincial Natural Science Foundation Youth Project (202303021212369), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42004114), and the Jiangxi Province Natural Science Foundation (Grant Nos. 20242BAB25191 and 20252BAC220017).
Conflict of interest
Yaju Hao is an Early Career Editorial Board Member of this journal, but was not in any way involved in the editorial and peer-review process conducted for this paper, directly or indirectly. The authors declare no potential conflict of interest.
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Journal of Seismic Exploration, Electronic ISSN: 0963-0651 Print ISSN: 0963-0651, Published by AccScience Publishing
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