This study considers the full waveform inversion (FWI) method based on the asymptotic solution of the Helmholtz equation. We provide frequency-dependent ray tracing to obtain the wave field used to compute the FWI gradient and calculate the modeled data.
With a comparable quality of the inverse problem solution as applied to the standard finite difference approach, the speed of the calculations in the asymptotic method is an order of magnitude higher. A series of numerical experiments demonstrate the approach's effectiveness in reconstructing the macro velocity structure of complex media for low frequencies.