Statistical modeling and denoising of microseismic signal for dropping ambient noise in wavelet domain

Abstract

Dropping the ambient noise from microseismic signals is very important for disaster monitoring such as a rockburst and early warning system using microseismic monitoring techniques in the mine and coal mines. Currently, it is still a challenge to remove high and low-frequency noise simultaneously without losing the useful information of microseismic signal. The aim of this paper is to remove the low-frequency noise contained in microseismic signal effectively, while preserving the useful signal information by using a stochastic approach. We first statistically model the wavelet coefficients in the approximation subband of noisy microseismic signal. In addition, we evaluate qualitatively and quantitatively the fitness of Gauss–Laplace mixture distribution and the statistical modeling of data. Then, we propose a novel denoising algorithm to remove the ambient noise effectively from the noisy microseismic signals in wavelet domain. This algorithm removes the low-frequency noise by using a stochastic approach and the high-frequency noise by using a traditional wavelet thresholding method. The low-frequency noise is removed by using a closed-form shrinkage function based on Gauss–Laplace mixture distribution, while the high-frequency noise is removed by using a threshold function combined with Garrote and hyperbolic threshold functions. Next, we evaluated the ambient denoising performance of our novel denoising algorithm by comparing it with various denoising methods with different test signals. Experimental results show that the ambient denoising performance of the proposed method is better than the other seven existing methods.