Denoising Seismic Data via a Threshold Shrink Method in the Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform Domain

In seismic exploration, effective seismic signals can be seriously distorted by and interfered with noise, and the performance of traditional seismic denoising approaches can hardly meet the requirements of high-precision seismic exploration. To remarkably enhance signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) and adapt to high-precision seismic exploration, this work exploits the non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) and threshold shrink method to design a new approach for suppressing seismic random noise. NSCT is an excellent multiscale, multidirectional, and shift-invariant image decomposition scheme, which can not only calculate exact contourlet transform coefficients through multiresolution analysis but also give an almost optimized approximation. It has better high-frequency response and stronger ability to describe curves and surfaces. Specifically, we propose to utilize the superior performance NSCT to decomposing the noisy seismic data into various frequency sub-bands and orientation response sub-bands, obtaining fine enough transform high frequencies to effectively achieve the separation of signals and noises. Besides, we use the adaptive Bayesian threshold shrink method instead of traditional handcraft threshold scheme for denoising the high-frequency sub-bands of NSCT coefficients, which pays more attention to the internal characteristics of the signals/data itself and improve the robustness of method, which can work better for preserving richer structure details of effective signals. The proposed method can achieve seismic random noise attenuation while retaining effective signals to the maximum degree. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method is superior to wavelet-based and curvelet-based threshold denoising methods, which increases synthetic seismic data with lower SNR from −8.2293 dB to 8.6838 dB, and 11.8084 dB and 9.1072 dB higher than two classic sparse transform based methods, respectively. Furthermore, we also apply the proposed method to process field data, which achieves satisfactory results.