A simple method inspired by empirical mode decomposition for denoising seismic data

Abstract

We developed a new and simple method for denoising seismic data, which was inspired by data-driven empirical mode decomposition (EMD) algorithms. The method, which can be applied either as a trace-by-trace process or in the f-x domain, replaces the use of the cubic interpolation scheme, which is required to calculate the mean envelopes of the signal and the residues, by window averaging. The resulting strategy is not viewed as an EMD per se, but a userfriendly version of EMD-based algorithms that permits us to attain, in a fraction of the time, the same level of noise cancellation as standard EMD implementations. Furthermore, the proposed method requires less user intervention and easily processes millions of traces in minutes rather than in hours as required by conventional EMD-based techniques on a standard PC. We compared the performance of the new method against standard EMD methods in terms of computational cost and signal preservation and applied them to denoise synthetic and field (microseismic and poststack) data containing random, erratic, and coherent noise. The corresponding f-x EMDs implementations for lateral continuity enhancement were analyzed and compared against the classical f-x deconvolution to test the method.