Least-squares decomposition with time–space constraint for denoising microseismic data

Abstract

SUMMARY Microseismic data are usually of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which makes it difficult to utilize the microseismic waveforms for imaging and inversion. We develop a useful denoising algorithm based on a non-stationary least-squares decomposition model to enhance the quality of microseismic signals. The microseismic signals are assumed to be represented by a superposition of several smoothly variable components. We construct a least-squares inverse problem to solve for the the smooth components. We constrain the least-squares inversion via both time and space constraints. The temporal smoothness constraint is applied to ensure the stability when calculating the non-stationary autoregression coefficients. The space-smoothness constraint is applied to extract the spatial correlation among multichannel microseismic traces. The new algorithm is validated via several synthetic and real microseismic data and are proved to be effective. Comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrates that the proposed method is more powerful in suppressing random noise of a wide range of levels than its competing methods.