  This paper introduces an iterative scheme for acoustic model inversion where
the notion of proximity of two traces is not the usual least-squares distance,
but instead involves registration as in image processing. Observed data are
matched to predicted waveforms via piecewise-polynomial warpings, obtained by
solving a nonconvex optimization problem in a multiscale fashion from low to
high frequencies. This multiscale process requires defining low-frequency
augmented signals in order to seed the frequency sweep at zero frequency.
Custom adjoint sources are then defined from the warped waveforms. The proposed
velocity updates are obtained as the migration of these adjoint sources, and
cannot be interpreted as the negative gradient of any given objective function.
The new method, referred to as RGLS, is successfully applied to a few scenarios
of model velocity estimation in the transmission setting. We show that the new
method can converge to the correct model in situations where conventional
least-squares inversion suffers from cycle-skipping and converges to a spurious
model.
