De-noising of transient electromagnetic data based on the long short-term memory-autoencoder

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SUMMARYLate-time transient electromagnetic (TEM) data contain deep subsurface information and are important for resolving deeper electrical structures. However, due to their relatively small signal amplitudes, TEM responses later in time are often dominated by ambient noises. Therefore, noise removal is critical to the application of TEM data in imaging electrical structures at depth. De-noising techniques for TEM data have been developed rapidly in recent years. Although strong efforts have been made to improving the quality of the TEM responses, it is still a challenge to effectively extract the signals due to unpredictable and irregular noises. In this study, we develop a new type of neural network architecture by combining the long short-term memory (LSTM) network with the autoencoder structure to suppress noise in TEM signals. The resulting LSTM-autoencoders yield excellent performance on synthetic data sets including horizontal components of the electric field and vertical component of the magnetic field generated by different sources such as dipole, loop and grounded line sources. The relative errors between the de-noised data sets and the corresponding noise-free transients are below 1% for most of the sampling points. Notable improvement in the resistivity structure inversion result is achieved using the TEM data de-noised by the LSTM-autoencoder in comparison with several widely-used neural networks, especially for later-arriving signals that are important for constraining deeper structures. We demonstrate the effectiveness and general applicability of the LSTM-autoencoder by de-noising experiments using synthetic 1-D and 3-D TEM signals as well as field data sets. The field data from a fixed loop survey using multiple receivers are greatly improved after de-noising by the LSTM-autoencoder, resulting in more consistent inversion models with significantly increased exploration depth. The LSTM-autoencoder is capable of enhancing the quality of the TEM signals at later times, which enables us to better resolve deeper electrical structures.