AccScience Publishing / JSE / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/JSE026030010
ARTICLE

Intelligent universal full-waveform inversion of seismic wavefields based on multi-scale Swin Transformer transposed U-Net

Binghui Zhao1,2 Liguo Han3* Pan Zhang3 Laiyu Lu1,4 Xujia Shang3 Tongwei Qin1,2
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1 Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration, Beijing, China
2 Beijing Baijiatuan Earth Sciences National Observation and Research Station, Beijing, China
3 College of Geoexploration Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun, Jilin, China
4 State Key Laboratory of Earthquake Dynamics and Forecasting, Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration, Beijing, China
Received: 16 January 2026 | Revised: 27 April 2026 | Accepted: 13 May 2026 | Published online: 19 June 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/ )
Abstract

The quality of the wavelet significantly affects the accuracy of full-waveform inversion (FWI). In practice, seismic data are often contaminated by non-ideal wavelets with complex side lobes and ambiguous dominant frequencies. Directly employing such data in conventional FWI workflows, which typically assume an ideal Ricker wavelet, can induce severe cycle-skipping problems and lead to inversion failure. Existing remedies, such as sophisticated source wavelet estimation or the design of wavelet-independent objective functions, often suffer from instability in estimation or the loss of waveform details. To address this issue at its root from a data-driven perspective, this study proposes a novel deep learning-based approach. We introduce a multi-scale Swin Transformer transposed U-Net (MSTU) network to intelligently transform seismic records containing unknown, non-ideal wavelets into universal records composed solely of ideal Ricker wavelets. Through end-to-end learning, our method establishes a direct nonlinear mapping from the complex wavelet domain to the universal wavelet domain, effectively stripping the inherent wavelet ambiguity from the raw data. Numerical examples demonstrate that data universal by the MSTU network can be directly fed into standard FWI routines, yielding superior inversion results. For data originally generated with Klauder or Ormsby wavelets, the inversion results obtained after our standardization process significantly outperform those from direct inversion using the incorrect wavelet or even using the original non-ideal wavelet itself. Moreover, the accuracy approaches the theoretical upper limit achievable by inversion with the ideal Ricker wavelet as the ground truth. Requiring no prior wavelet estimation or modification to the core inversion algorithm, our method serves as an efficient, robust, and “plug-and-play” data preprocessing tool, offering a highly practical solution to enhance the reliability of FWI for field seismic data.

Keywords
Multi-scale Swin Transformer transposed U-Net
Wavelet standardization
Full-waveform inversion
Deep learning
Seismic data processing
Wavefield reconstruction
Funding
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no.42474081; 42130805; 42374147), the Jilin Provincial Natural Science Foundation Outstanding Young Scientist Fund Project (no. 20250101038JJ), and the Special Fund of the Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration (no. DQJB26B29).
Conflict of interest
The authors declare they have no competing interests.
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Journal of Seismic Exploration, Electronic ISSN: 0963-0651 Print ISSN: 0963-0651, Published by AccScience Publishing