Swell-noise attenuation: A deep learning approach

Abstract

Noise attenuation for ordinary images using machine learning technology has achieved great success in the computer vision field. However, directly applying these models to seismic data would not be effective since the evaluation criteria from the geophysical domain require a high-quality visualized image and the ability to maintain original seismic signals from the contaminated wavelets. This paper introduces an approach equipped with a specially designed deep learning model that can effectively attenuate swell noise with different intensities and characteristics from shot gathers with a relatively simple workflow applicable to marine seismic data sets. Three significant benefits are introduced from the proposed deep learning model. First, our deep learning model doesn't need to consume a pure swell-noise model. Instead, a contaminated swell-noise model derived from field data sets (which may contain other noises or primary signals) can be used for training. Second, inspired by the conventional algorithm for coherent noise attenuation, our neural network model is designed to learn and detect the swell noise rather than inferring the attenuated seismic data. Third, several comparisons (signal-to-noise ratio, mean squared error, and intensities of residual swell noises) indicate that the deep learning approach has the capability to remove swell noise without harming the primary signals. The proposed deep learning-based approach can be considered as an alternative approach that combines and takes advantage of both the conventional and data-driven method to better serve swell-noise attenuation. The comparable results also indicate that the deep learning method has strong potential to solve other coherent noise-attenuation tasks for seismic data.