Footprint removal from seismic data with residual dictionary learning

Abstract

Dictionary learning (DL) is a machine learning technique that can be used to find a sparse representation of a given data set by means of a relatively small set of atoms, which are learned from the input data. DL allows for the removal of random noise from seismic data very effectively. However, when seismic data are contaminated with footprint noise, the atoms of the learned dictionary are often a mixture of data and coherent noise patterns. In this scenario, DL requires carrying out a morphological attribute classification of the atoms to separate the noisy atoms from the dictionary. Instead, we have developed a novel DL strategy for the removal of footprint patterns in 3D seismic data that is based on an augmented dictionary built upon appropriately filtering the learned atoms. The resulting augmented dictionary, which contains the filtered atoms and their residuals, has a high discriminative power in separating signal and footprint atoms, thus precluding the use of any statistical classification strategy to segregate the atoms of the learned dictionary. We filter the atoms using a domain transform filtering approach, a very efficient edge-preserving smoothing algorithm. As in the so-called coherence-constrained DL method, the proposed DL strategy does not require the user to know or adjust the noise level or the sparsity of the solution for each data set. Furthermore, it only requires one pass of DL and is shown to produce successful transfer learning. This increases the speed of the denoising processing because the augmented dictionary does not need to be calculated for each time slice of the input data volume. Results on synthetic and 3D public-domain poststack field data demonstrate effective footprint removal with accurate edge preservation.