Denoising of pre‐stack seismic data using subspace estimation methods

Abstract

Denoising is one of the core steps in seismic data processing flow. The seismic gather consists of multiple traces captured at different receivers. A set of receivers observe waves which are reflected from the same reflection point. Those traces need to be grouped together as they contain the same information about the earth subsurface layers. This is done by finding a common mid-point (CMP) between the source and geophones. The time delay between CMP gathered traces are corrected by the normal move out correction method but the individual traces are corrupted by noise. In this paper we, propose a method for denoising individual traces. The set of traces can be modelled as belonging to a low-dimensional subspace of an ambient signal space. This allows for construction of sparse representations of each trace in terms of other traces in the CMP gather. The resulting sparse representations are subsequently utilised to construct approximations of individual traces and thus, noise is suppressed. We constructed, the approximations using orthogonal matching pursuit. We applied proposed method to synthetic and field seismic data, the proposed technique performs better on established benchmarks while capturing the true locations of weak reflections and effectively attenuating the random noise.