Applications of the synchrosqueezing transform in seismic time-frequency analysis

Abstract

Time-frequency representation of seismic signals provides a source of information that is usually hidden in the Fourier spectrum. The short-time Fourier transform and the wavelet transform are the principal approaches to simultaneously decompose a signal into time and frequency components. Known limitations, such as trade-offs between time and frequency resolution, may be overcome by alternative techniques that extract instantaneous modal components. Empirical mode decomposition aims to decompose a signal into components that are well separated in the time-frequency plane allowing the reconstruction of these components. On the other hand, a recently proposed method called the “synchrosqueezing transform” (SST) is an extension of the wavelet transform incorporating elements of empirical mode decomposition and frequency reassignment techniques. This new tool produces a well-defined time-frequency representation allowing the identification of instantaneous frequencies in seismic signals to highlight individual components. We introduce the SST with applications for seismic signals and produced promising results on synthetic and field data examples.