  We study the seismic inverse problem for the recovery of subsurface
properties in acoustic media. In order to reduce the ill-posedness of the
problem, the heterogeneous wave speed parameter to be recovered is represented
using a limited number of coefficients associated with a basis of eigenvectors
of a diffusion equation, following the regularization by discretization
approach. We compare several choices for the diffusion coefficient in the
partial differential equations, which are extracted from the field of image
processing. We first investigate their efficiency for image decomposition
(accuracy of the representation with respect to the number of variables and
denoising). Next, we implement the method in the quantitative reconstruction
procedure for seismic imaging, following the Full Waveform Inversion method,
where the difficulty resides in that the basis is defined from an initial model
where none of the actual structures is known. In particular, we demonstrate
that the method is efficient for the challenging reconstruction of media with
salt-domes. We employ the method in two and three-dimensional experiments and
show that the eigenvector representation compensates for the lack of low
frequency information, it eventually serves us to extract guidelines for the
implementation of the method.
