Downloaded 01/18/17 to 139.78.26.100. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.

org/

GEOPHYSICS, VOL. 81, NO. 3 (MAY-JUNE 2016); P. V249V260, 11 FIGS., 1 TABLE.

10.1190/GEO2015-0601.1

Seismic denoising using the redundant lifting scheme

Afshin Aghayan1, Priyank Jaiswal1, and Hamid Reza Siahkoohi2

significantly stronger than the desired events, the WCs can be

surgically muted. Selective muting in carefully chosen SGs attenuates undesired events while having minimal effects on frequency spectra of the desired events. In addition, random noise
can be suppressed in the individual SGs by designing a local
thresholding mechanism (we have used modified Otsu thresholding) in combination with adaptive Wiener filtering. We
have developed this approach of suppressing coherent and random noise in a step-by-step manner first using a synthetic shot
gather, followed by demonstration on two real gathers. Our
RLS-based denoising method has minimal effects on the lower
end of signal frequency spectra, and it could be a valuable tool
in a processors toolbox when data preconditioning for advanced processing such as waveform inversion, which benefits
from low frequencies, is desired.

ABSTRACT
Separating linear coherent noise, such as ground roll
from reflections, remains a key challenge in seismic processing. By adapting the redundant lifting scheme (RLS), a wavelet
transform method, to seismic data, we have determined how
the wavelet domain can be used to suppress coherent and random noise. The RLS operates on a trace-by-trace basis decomposing each time series into wavelet-coefficient (WC) time
series and consequently a single gather (in a shot, receiver,
or common depth point domain) into a series of WC subgathers (SGs). The decomposition changes the relative magnitude of WCs of various events (reflection, head wave, ground
roll, etc.) from one SG to another without affecting their moveout. In SG(s) in which the WCs of undesired events were

2D polarization (Shieh and Herrmann, 1990); Karhunen-Loeve

transform (Liu, 1999), radial trace transform (Henley, 2003), and
Wiener-Levinson transform (Karsli and Bayrak, 2004).
In vertical-component land seismic data, the ubiquitous surface
waves can be identified as coherent, dispersive, high-amplitude,
and low-frequency events propagating with near-S-wave velocity
(Sheriff and Geldart, 1995) and generally constitute the ground roll.
In the prestack domain, ground roll can have significant overlaps
with reflections in the frequency-wavenumber and time-offset domains, sometimes masking the reflections beyond an interpreters
picking ability (Yilmaz, 2001). This overlap is greater in narrow
aperture acquisitions, such as in most of the near-surface cases.
The presence of ground roll interferes with all subsequent processing and imaging steps. In principle, stacking should attenuate
ground roll because they have near-linear moveouts. In practice,
however, stacking data without proper ground roll attenuation generates remnant high-amplitude patches that can obscure the reflections.

INTRODUCTION
Field seismic data are a superposition of various kinds of body
and surface waves in which individual events (coherent wave trains
with characteristic moveout, amplitude, and frequency spectra) contain information about different subsurface geometric and physical
properties. For example, reflections yield structural images whereas
ground roll yields near-surface S-wave velocity. Thus, to extract
most information out of the field data, it is necessary to select appropriate events and model them appropriately. The challenge in
separating the events is to ensure that the amplitude and frequency
spectra of the desired events remain unaffected, whereas undesired
events are suppressed. In denoising methods in general, data acquired in time-offset (t-x) domain are first transformed to a domain
where the overlapping events show appreciable separation using an
appropriate methods. Examples include spectral balancing (Coruh
and Costain, 1983), frequency-wavenumber filtering (Embree et al.,
1963; Treitel et al., 1967), local slant stacking (Harlan et al., 1984),

Manuscript received by the Editor 5 November 2015; revised manuscript received 27 January 2016; published online 03 May 2016.
1
Oklahoma State University, Boone Pickens School of Geology, Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA. E-mail: aghayan@okstate.edu; priyank.jaiswal@okstate.edu.
2
University of Tehran, Institute of Geophysics, Tehran, Iran. E-mail: hamid@ut.ac.ir.
2016 Society of Exploration Geophysicists. All rights reserved.
V249

Downloaded 01/18/17 to 139.78.26.100. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/

V250

Aghayan et al.

In their pioneering work, Embree et al. (1963) show that ground

roll can somewhat be separated from reflections in frequency-wavenumber (f-k) domain. As seismic studies undertake investigation of
more complex geology overlain by rugged or unconsolidated overburden, more complex and innovative approaches were needed. Examples include derivative filters (Melo et al., 2009; Nie et al., 2014),
empirical model decomposition (Bekara and van der Baan, 2009),
time-frequency transforms (Askari and Siahkoohi, 2008; Liu and
Fomel, 2013), and compressed sensing and sparsity promotion
(Wang et al., 2008; Gholami, 2014). A generic shortcoming of these
methods is the operational loss of the lower end of the body wave
frequency spectrum, whose importance is increasingly being recognized in advanced processing such as full-waveform inversion.
In this paper, we show how ground roll and reflections, which
overlap in the x-t and f-k domains, can be effectively separated
in the wavelet domain. We also show that the wavelet domain provides opportunity to address the linear coherent noise and random
noise. Prior to us, authors such as Kumar and Foufoula-Georgiou
(1997) and Deighan and Watts (1997) have discussed wavelet domain for denoising using classical wavelet transform (WT) algorithms. The novelty of our approach is in adapting the redundant
lifting scheme (RLS) (Claypoole et al., 2003), which is an advanced
algorithm for WT offering significant benefits over classical methods (see Sweldens [1998] for details). The wavelet domain is regularly used in image processing as a way of compressing images
(Antonini et al., 1992). It decomposes a continuous signal using
basis functions that have finite extent in frequency and time domains. Its biggest advantage is in being able to decompose nonstationary signals (Fomel and Liu, 2010), which makes it ideal for
treating seismic data sets.
Sweldens (1996) introduces the lifting scheme (LS) as a nextgeneration WT algorithm. The LS was an alternate implementation
of the classical WT in the time domain without using the Fourier
transform as a design tool for wavelets or without using translates
and dilates of one fixed function (Daubechies and Sweldens, 1998).
Besides being fully invertible, LS had several advantages over

classical WT methods such as adaptive wavelet design, in-place calculations, irregular sampling, and integers-to-integer transform
(Sweldens, 1998). However, it suffers from aliasing. Transformation through LS is done in three steps: splitting, prediction, and updating (Figure 1a). At the splitting stage, the input signal is divided
into two disjoint sets (odd and even samples), which is a downsampling process that creates aliasing (Bao et al., 2009). In image
processing, in which aliasing is not the foremost concern, LS remains popular despite its known limitation. As an improvement
over LS, Claypoole et al. (2003) propose RLS, which circumvents
the aliasing problem by not going through the splitting stage and
zero padding the prediction and the update operators (Claypoole
et al., 2003). Aghayan et al. (2012) show that domain transformation through RLS provided appropriate opportunities for suppression of coherent and random noise.
The organization of the paper is as follows. We first present LS
and RLS methods and show how both are related. Although LS
is not used for processing in this paper, it forms the foundation
for RLS and therefore warrants an introduction. In a step-by-step
manner, we then show how RLS operates on seismic data using
a synthetic data set. In summary, RLS operates in a trace-by-trace
manner. It decomposes a trace into multiple wavelet coefficient
(WC) time series and, consequently, a gather (shot, receiver, or
common depth point [CDP]) into multiple subgathers (SGs). This
decomposition only changes the relative magnitude of various
events (reflection, head wave, ground roll, etc.) from one SG to another without impacting their moveout. In SGs in which the WCs of
undesired events are overwhelmingly stronger than that of desired
events, they can be surgically muted. Selective muting in carefully
chosen SGs attenuates undesired events while having minimal effect on frequency spectra of the desired events. Random noise can
be suppressed in the individual SGs by designing a local thresholding mechanism (modified Otsu thresholding in this paper) in combination with adaptive Wiener filter (AWF). In the synthetic data
set, we treat low-frequency events with a linear moveout as a proxy
for ground roll. Following this, we show the results from application
of the workflow on two field gathers. Finally, we
discuss the strengths and limitations of the proposed RLS-based denoising method and suggest
possible avenues for its improvements.

THEORY
Lifting scheme
For data set c0 , the three stages of LS can be
formulated as (Sweldens, 1996) (Figure 1a):
1) Split: This is a decimation stage where c0 is
divided into even ce0 and odd co0 subsets, respectively.
2) Predict: Subset co0 is predicted using subset
ce0 and a prediction operator P. A prediction
error d1 is then defined as

d1 co0 Pce0 :
Figure 1. Schematics (a) LS and (b) RLS. The basic difference between LS and RLS is
in the way of splitting data.

(1)

3) Update: A new data set c1 is constructed using d1 , an operator U, and ce0 :

RLS-based denoising

Downloaded 01/18/17 to 139.78.26.100. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/

c1 ce0 Ud1 :

(2)

Next, steps 13 are repeated in an iterative manner using the

newly constructed data set c1 as input data in each iteration. Results
from consecutive iterations are referred to as the generating of the
next transform level or scale. The prediction error in every scale is
referred to as the detail of that scale, and the newly constructed data
set is referred to as the approximate of that scale (Daubechies and
Sweldens, 1998). The iterations can be continued until the approximate is only two samples long. At the end of n iterations, the input
signal decomposes into n details denoted by djj1;2; : : : ;n and one
approximate denoted by cn. Together, the details and approximate
constitute the WCs of c0 . The prediction and update operators in LS
work as high- and low-pass frequency filters (Claypoole et al.,
2003) in a manner that after the update stage, no contributions from
the first half of the frequency bandwidth of the input signal remain
in the detailed part (Stepien et al., 2000). The main advantage of the
LS over classical WT methods is the ease of implementation of the
inverse part (transformation from wavelet to time domain):

cej1 cj Udj ;
coj1 dj Pcej1 ;
cj1

and

mergefcoj1 ; cej1 g:

(3)

In the context of this paper, the biggest drawback of LS is aliasing

that occurs in the splitting stage due to creation of redundant frequencies. For a detailed discussion, we guide the reader to Bao
et al. (2009).

Redundant LS

the input for the next iteration, and also like in the LS, the inverse
transform in RLS is also straightforward to implement

cuj1 k cj k

N~
X

Urdj k 2j1 N~ 2r 1;

r1

cpj1 k dj k

N
X

Prcuj1 k 2j1 N 2r 1;

r1

1
cj1 n cuj1 cpj1 :
2

(6)

The basic difference between LS and RLS can be understood as

follows: in LS, the length of the prediction and update operator stay
the same in every scale but the length of detail and approximate
reduced by one-half from one scale to the next due to splitting.
In RLS, the length of the prediction and update operators are
changed through zero padding such that the length of the detail
and the approximate does not change from one scale to another.
The decomposition of frequency bandwidth for input data with
1 ms sample intervals up to five scales is shown in Figure 2. In each
scale, the frequency bandwidth of the approximate of the previous
scale is split into two equal halves. The lower frequency bandwidth
is approximate and high-frequency part is detail. Further, in RLS,
the phase spectrum of the input signal can also be maintained in
every scale if the prediction and update operators are chosen as symmetrical (Bao et al., 2009). In this paper, we have used the Deslauriers-Dubuc family of wavelet (Deslauriers and Dubuc, 1989) as
prediction and update operators because they are the shortest (minimum number of samples) symmetric wavelets (Sweldens, 1996).

Thresholding

As opposed to LS, the RLS has only two stages: predict and update (Figure 1b). Let us assume that the length of prediction and
~ respectively, and the length of the
update operators are N and N,
input data set c0 is l. For avoiding aliasing problem of LS, in
the RLS splitting stage, in the jth scale by padding 2j 1 zeros
between coefficients of prediction and update operators, the length
of signal in all scales is preserved. In another words, the length of
prediction and update operators increases in each scale (Bao et al.,
2009). The RLS can be formulated as (Bao et al., 2009):
1) Predict: In the jth scale every sample of c0 can be predicted
based on prediction operator P. The prediction error, or the detail d, is defined as

dj k cj1 k

V251

N
X

Prcj1 k 2j1 N 2r 1:

r1

Thresholding is a common way of noise suppression in waveletbased methods (Vidakovic, 2009; Soman, 2010), in which coefficients with magnitude larger than a predefined threshold value ()
are only allowed to pass. There are several methods for defining
threshold value such as Donoho and Johnstone (1995) method,
Steins unbiased risk estimate (SURE) (Stein, 1981), BayesShrink
(Ruggeri, 1999), and Otsu methods (Otsu, 1975). The Otsu method
in particular can be adapted to data with a large dynamic range
(Gader et al., 2004; Mokji and Bakar, 2007), such as a seismic trace;
therefore, it is our method of choice. However, a significant modification has to be made to the Otsu method prior to using it with
seismic data sets (see section The Otsu Thresholding).
Thresholding can be applied in several ways: soft, hard, garrote,
and semisoft (Vidakovic, 2009; Soman, 2010). We have selected the
hard method due to its simplicity of application, which is expressed
in our context as

(4)
x

2) Update: The approximate c is defined as

cj k cj1 k

N~
X

Urdj k 2j1 N~ 2r 1:

r1

(5)
Like in the LS, the details and approximate are generated by repeating steps 1 and 2 with approximate from one iteration serving as

x
0

for all jxj

;
otherwise

(7)

where x is the input, and x is the output from thresholding.

The Otsu thresholding

We will first explain the Otsus (1975) method using the
example of a gray-scale image. Let pixels of a given image be represented in L levels. In context of a gray-scale image, level is a

Aghayan et al.

V252

Downloaded 01/18/17 to 139.78.26.100. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/

certain gray-scale value. Let ni be the number of pixel P

at a level i.
Then, the total number of pixels in the whole image N is Li ni . The
histogram of an image is defined by

ni
N

(8)

hi 1:

(9)

hi
such that
L
X
i1

Putting a threshold at level k (1 < k < L) divides the total pixels

into two classes C0 and C1 , where C0 has pixels from level l through
k, and C1 has pixels from k 1 through L levels. The pixel proportions and mean of C0 and C1 are

k
X

hi ;

i1

L
X

h i 1 0 ;

(10)

ik1

Modified Otsu thresholding

The original application of Otsu (1975) was in image processing
in which pixels only have positive and integer values. In contrast,
seismic time series are nonintegers besides having both polarities.
As a result, the WCs of a seismic trace are positive and negative.
The first modification we have made is to threshold the positive and
negative WCs independently. The next modification is applying Otsus (1975) method for the large dynamic range of the seismic data.
The running time window is an analysis window with fixed number
of samples (usually odd) whose central value is a consecutively increasing time sample of the trace. If we intend the running time
window lz to be s samples long with the zth sample in its center,
it will be computed as



 
X
s
z
l z dj
H n
2
n



s
H n
z
;
2
where H is a step function defined at the nth sample as


0

k
X
i1

ihi
;
0

(14)

L
X

ihi
1
:

ik1 1

Hn
(11)

To evaluate separation between C0 and C1 for a given threshold,

Otsu (1975) introduces between-class variance ( 2B k) as a discriminant criterion:

2B k 0 1 0 1 2 :

(12)

At highest between-class variance, data have the maximum separability, and the corresponding threshold is referred to as the optimal
threshold value ( ) (Otsu, 1975):

2B  max1<k<L 2B k:

(13)

In this paper, thresholding is performed in the wavelet domain.

1
0

n0
:
n<0

(15)

In term of application, first we define s (101 samples in this paper). Then, a threshold value is computed based on the sign of the
zth WC. For instance, for positive z, we preserve all of positive WCs
within lz , put zero instead of negative WCs, and calculate threshold
value z based on Otsu method. In similar way, the threshold z is
calculated if the sign of z is negative. In this manner, we define a
unique threshold value for each sample of the SG.

Adaptive Wiener filter

Wiener filtering is generally applied under the assumption of
space-time stationarity of signal and noise (Gonzalez and Woods,
2002). However, this assumption is rarely true. Lim (1990) proposes sample-by-sample processing, which assumes that signal
and noise are only locally stationary. Following this approach, Ercelebi and Koc (2006) apply the AWF locally in the neighborhood

Figure 2. Bandwidth decomposition in RLS. This example is for input data with 500 Hz Nyquist frequency. In each scale, the frequency
bandwidth of the input signal is split into two equal halves. The higher frequency bandwidth group is referred to as the detail di and the lower is
referred to as the approximate ci . The approximate from the previous scale is decomposed in the next scale.

RLS-based denoising

Downloaded 01/18/17 to 139.78.26.100. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/

of individual WCs. In context of this paper, Ddj k; h, which is the

WC at the kth time sample and hth trace in the detail of the jth scale,
can be considered as a combination of band-restricted signal
Sdj k; h and white Gaussian noise (WGN), (Ndj k; h) (Kim
and Woods, 1994):

Ddj k; h Sdj k; h Ndj k; h:

(16)

We assume WGN to be stationary with a zero mean and variance

2N d , and it is uncorrelated with any SG. We also assume Sdj k; h
j
to be locally stationary and expressible as (Lim, 1990; Ercelebi and
Koc, 2006)

Sdj k; h mSdj k;h Sdj k;h wk; h;

(17)

where mSdj k;h and Sdj k;h are, respectively, the local mean and
standard deviation of Sdj k; h and wk; h is WGN with unit vari^ Sdj k;h and variance ^ 2Sd k;h of a noisy
ance. The estimated mean m
j

WCs can be expressed as

^ Sdj k;h
m

M
h
N
X
1 kX
D p; q;
MN pkM qhN dj

^ 2Dd

k;h
j

kN
hN
X
1 X
^ Sdj p;q 2 ;
D p; q m
MN pkM qhN dj

^ 2Sd

where ^ 2Dd

k;h

maxf0; ^ 2Dd

k;h

is a estimated local variance of Ddj k; h, and M and

k;h

2Nd g;

(18)

N are size of window that defines the neighborhood size around

each WC (3 3 in this paper). Finally, the estimated band-restricted
signal S^ dj k; h extracted from Ddj k; h can be expressed as (Lim,
1990)

^ Sdj k;h
S^ dj k; h m

^ 2Sd

k;h

^ 2Sd k;h
j

2Nd

V253

APPLICATION AND RESULTS

Synthetic data
Our workflow for application of the proposed method is presented in Figure 3. At the outset, a shot (or receiver or CMP) gather
is decomposed into the first-scale detail and approximate SGs. The
approximate SG from the first scale is decomposed again into detail
and the approximate of the second scale. The process is continued to
subsequent scales until an approximate is obtained in which the
ground roll has an overwhelmingly strong presence; i.e., the processor has been able to identify the dominant frequency band of the
ground roll. At this stage, the WCs of the ground roll are surgically
muted in that approximate and/or detail. Following this, the remaining WCs are transformed from the wavelet to time domain. These
steps help in suppressing the ground roll. For random noise, modified Otsu thresholding followed by the AWF needs to be applied to
the details of all scales (and approximate if needed) prior to the inverse transform.
We illustrate the workflow using a synthetic gather (Figure 4).
We intend to make this example relevant to ground roll suppression
for illustration simplicity. All data discussed in this paper, synthetic
and real (Figures 4a, 7a, and 9a), have sampling intervals of 1 ms
and the frequency bandwidth of their detail and approximate SGs
based on RLS is similar to Figure 2. Figure 4a shows the signal
component of the synthetic gather. It has a complex geometric pattern to include a wide range of wavenumbers. To create a realistic
field gather, we contaminate signal in Figure 4a with linear coherent
noise (high-amplitude low-frequency events with linear moveout
somewhat imitating ground roll) and WGN (Figure 4b). Figure 5a
and 5b are, respectively, the first-scale detail and approximate SGs
of the noisy data (Figure 4b). Figure 5b appears very similar to the
original noisy data in that it has signal and linear coherent noise.
The first-scale approximate (Figure 5b) is decomposed again into
the second-scale detail and an approximate (Figure 5c and 5d). The
approximate of the second scale is examined in the same manner as

^ Sdj k;h :
Ddj k; h m
j

(19)
For applying AWF in the jth scale, N dj needs to be estimated. It
can be done using the Immerkaers (1996) method as

N dj

r
X

jDdj  Lapj;
2 6H 2V 2 d

(20)

where * is a convolution operator, H and V are the numbers of

samples in horizontal and vertical directions of data, respectively,
and Lap is the Laplacian operator:

3
1 2 1
6
7
Lap 4 2 4 2 5:
1 2 1

(21)

The advantage of using Immerkaers (1996) method is its unbiased nature toward data patterns.

Figure 3. Workflow of proposed method.

Downloaded 01/18/17 to 139.78.26.100. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/

V254

Aghayan et al.

the first scale process is continued (Figure 5e5j). As seen in Figure 5, regardless of the scale, the moveout pattern of events in all the
details and the approximates SGs remain identical in the original
data, just the relative strength of the WCs of different events are
changed from one SG to another. With every subsequent scale, the
signal appears to be getting more dominant in the details whereas
the ground roll gets localized in the approximates. The approximate
of the fifth scale (Figure 5j) has minimal signal content and is
mostly dominated by the ground roll. We selectively mute WCs
within a zone defined by a white dashed triangle (Figure 5j). Transforming the remaining WCs (details of the first to fifth scales and
the remaining WCs from the fifth scale approximate) back into the
time domain effectively suppressed the ground roll (Figure 4c). The
rejected data components are presented as a difference plot in Figure 4d. The random noise still remains in Figure 4c.
Unlike linear coherent noise, WCs of random noise are distributed in all the SGs. In some SGs, the randomness is more evident.

Figure 4. Synthetic results. (a) Signal, (b) signal

in panel (a) contaminated with linear coherent
and random noise, (c) results of ground roll suppression (see text for details), (d) data difference
between panels (c and b) showing the discarded
low-frequency ground roll with linear moveout,
(e) result of additional random noise suppression,
(f) data difference between panels (c and e) showing the discarded random noise, (g) comparison on
spectra of panels (a, b, and e) showing that the
lower end of the signal frequency spectra is preserved after denoising (Figure 5). Data in panels
(a-f) are in time domain with sample interval of
1 ms.

For example, the detail of the first scale (Figure 5a) does not show
any coherent pattern. As a first step, we mute this detail in its entirety. In the second scale detail (Figure 5c), the coherent patterns
are very weak. Keeping in view of its high band frequency (125
250 Hz), we muted this SG in its entirety as well. Up to this stage,
our process is effectively that of the low-pass filter. Coherent and
random patterns can be recognized in the details of the third to fifth
scales (Figure 5e, 5g, and 5I). We apply the modified Otsu thresholding followed by 2D AWF to these SGs. A display of the threshold values of each WC of third to fifth scales computed using
equations 815 is, respectively, shown in Figure 6. Because we have
applied hard thresholding, only WCs that are greater than the
respective threshold values are used in the inverse transform. In
Figure 6, threshold values are consistently higher along coherent
events, which can be understood as follows. We have computed
threshold values in a sample-by-sample manner but within a moving time window. In general, higher WCs within the computational

Downloaded 01/18/17 to 139.78.26.100. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/

RLS-based denoising
window will generate higher threshold values. However, if WCs are
consistently higher within the computational window as opposed to
being a spike (coherent versus random), the threshold value will be
relatively lower; thus, this manner allows coherent events to pass
while rejecting spikes and random noise.
Figure 4e shows results from additional suppression of linear coherent noise. Figure 4f presents the difference between Figure 4c
and 4e, showing that our method has only extracted random noise
leaving the coherent events relatively unaffected. A comparison of
the amplitude spectra of the clean, noisy, and denoised data in Figure 4g also suggests that our method preserves the lower end of the
frequency spectrum of the signal, which can be of significant value
when the data have to be further processed using more advanced
methods such as full-waveform inversion. The signal-to-noise ratio
(S/N) of the denoised data is computed as


SN 10 log10


kSk22
;
^ 22
kS Sk

(22)

which shows a significant improvement from 0.31 (Figure 4b: for

noisy data) to 9.98 dB (Figure 4e). In equation 22, S is the signal
and S^ is the noisy or denoised data (Chen and Fomel, 2015).

Real data
We demonstrate the application of our method on two field shot
gathers from a basin-scale exploration experiment. Both data sets
were acquired using point explosive sources. The first data set

V255

was acquired using 120 channels spaced 12.5 m apart. This data
set is contaminated by random noise and ground roll (Figure 7a).
Our denoising procedure for this data set exactly follows the synthetic scenario. We decompose the field gather into five scales. The
details and approximate for all scales are shown in Figure 8. Similar
to the synthetic example, we find that the ground roll can be dominantly isolated in the approximate of the fifth scale, whereas the
random noise is prevalent in all the five details. We mute the first
and the second details (Figure 8a and 8c), threshold the third to fifth
details (Figure 8e, 8g, and 8i) using the modified Otsu method followed by 2D AWF, and we surgically mute the approximate SG
(white triangle; Figure 8j). Reconstructed data in the time domain
after muting the WCs are shown in Figure 7b. The data difference is
shown in Figure 7c, and the spectra of the noisy and denoised data
are compared in Figure 7d (dashed and solid lines, respectively).
Figure 7d shows that our method suppresses ground roll and
random noise without significantly impacting the lower end of the
frequency spectrum of the signal. For this particular data set, sequential applications of thresholding and AWF were most effective
in attenuating random noise, but this may not be the case for all
data sets.
The second data set (Figure 9a) was acquired using 65 channels
spaced 5 m apart. These data are mainly contaminated by ground
roll and not by random noise. We, therefore, show results from
only suppressing linear coherent noise. Much like in the previous two examples, we decomposed the data into five scales
(Figure 10) and surgically muted the approximate of the fifth scale
(Figure 10j). Reconstructing the remaining WCs back into the time

Figure 5. Wavelet domain synthetic data decomposition. Images in panels (a, c, e, g, and i) are details and in panels (b, d, f, h, and j) are
approximates obtained by decomposing the noisy data (Figure 4b) in five scales, respectively. Data in panels (a-j) are in the wavelet domain.
The low-frequency linear moveout ground roll is suppressed by surgically muting the WCs in the approximate of the fifth scale ([j] inside the
dashed white line). The random noise is suppressed though thresholding the details of third to fifth scale (panels e, g, and i).

Aghayan et al.

Downloaded 01/18/17 to 139.78.26.100. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/

V256

domain (Figure 9b), we see that the denoised data show reflections
that were originally suppressed by the ground roll coda. The difference between the raw and denoised data is shown in Figure 9c, and
their spectra are compared in Figure 9d (dash and solid lines, respectively). Much like the previous examples, the lower end of
the frequency spectrum is preserved in the denoised data.

DISCUSSION
Numerous methods of attenuating coherent and random noise exist in seismic processing literature, most of which attempt to separate signal and noise in either frequency or wavenumber domain.
As a standard comparison, we contrast our synthetic results with
results from f-k filtering (Embree et al., 1963). Figure 11a is the
f-k transform of the signal from Figure 4a. Figure 11b and 11c
is f-k transforms of the linear coherent noise and the contaminated
data. In Figure 11c, we have marked a polygon that dominantly
includes the linear coherent noise. Coefficients within the polygon
are zeroed, and the remaining coefficients are transformed into the

Figure 6. Threshold values. Images correspond to

details of third to fifth scale in Figure 5.

Figure 7. First real data set denoising example.

(a) Field data (see text for acquisition parameters).
(b) Denoised data using the proposed RLS-based
denoising method. (c) Data difference between
panels (a and b) showing data discarded while
processing. (d) Comparison on spectra of panels
(a and b) showing that the low-frequency component of the reflections is preserved.

time-offset domain through inverse f-k transform. Although the result of f-k filtering (Figure 11d) in the time domain appears similar
to the uncontaminated signal, a closer look at the frequency spectrum (Figure 11e) suggests significant loss of lower end of the frequency spectrum.
The proposed methods can be applied in the shot, receiver, or
CMP domain. However, its application is not as straightforward
as frequency filtering and the complexity depends on the terrain.
For example, if there is a significant repeatability in the character
of ground roll from one shot/receiver/CMP gather to the next, the
number of scales into which the data must be decomposed and
geometry of mute gate can be set based on a single gather and applied to the rest. However, if the character of the ground roll changes
significantly across the profile, e.g., across a thrust belt, individual
gathers may have to be analyzed independently of each other.
A denoising approach that is comparable to our method in the
literature for ground roll suppression is the invertible local timefrequency (LTF) transform (Askari and Siahkoohi, 2008; Liu and
Fomel, 2013). The LTF transform is only used for ground roll

RLS-based denoising

Downloaded 01/18/17 to 139.78.26.100. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/

suppression. In the LTF method, frequency is localized in time. By

juxtaposing LTF of each trace in order of offset, a time-spacefrequency (t-x-f) cube is created. In another words, monofrequency

V257

sections are created in time-space domain. If an undesired coherent

event is found to be localized in time and space (e.g., ground roll), it
can be removed by designing a simple muting gate for local fre-

Figure 8. Wavelet domain decomposition of first real data set. Images in panels (a, c, e, g, and i) are details and in panels (b, d, f, h, and j) are
approximates obtained by decomposing the field data from Figure 7a in five scales, respectively. Data in panels (a-j) are in wavelet domain. The
low-frequency linear moveout ground roll is suppressed by surgically muting the WCs in the approximate of the fifth scale ([j] inside white
polygon). The random noise is suppressed though thresholding the details of third to fifth scale.

Figure 9. Second real data set denoising example.

(a) Field data (see text for acquisition parameters).
(b) Denoised data using the proposed RLS-based
denoising method, (c) data difference between
panels (a and b) showing data discarded while
processing, (d) comparison on spectra of panels
(a and b) showing that the low-frequency component of the reflections is preserved.

Downloaded 01/18/17 to 139.78.26.100. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/

V258

Aghayan et al.

quency components in each monofrequency section. The denoised

data are obtained by applying the inverse LTF transform. A significant
benefit of operating in the wavelet domain as opposed to LTF domain
is the possibility of thresholding for removal of random noise.
The choice of wavelet in WT is often problem dependent. Deighan and Watts (1997) choose Battle-Lemarie for minimizing aliasing problem that happened during their wavelet decomposition
algorithm. Fomel and Liu (2010) use the Haar wavelet (Haar,
1910) and the Cohen-Daubechies-Feauveau (CDF) 5/3 wavelet
(Cohen et al., 1992) for applying the seislet transform, but they
use the CDF 9/7 wavelet (Lian et al., 2001) for the OC-seislet transform (Liu and Fomel, 2010). To the best of our knowledge, a standardized testing method to determine the optimal wavelet for seismic
data processing does not exist. Two factors influence our wavelet
choice: First, because our method is expensive in that the total number of operations is proportional to length of wavelet, we must
choose the wavelet with minimum length. Second, for avoiding
phase distortions, our wavelet must be symmetric. These conditions
led us to choose the Deslauriers-Dubuc wavelet (Deslauriers and
Dubuc, 1989). We have not tested other wavelets and therefore acknowledge that other wavelets, which may be better suited for our
algorithm, could exist. Wavelet selection is an ongoing task but beyond the scope of the current paper.
Pivotal to suppression of random noise is the modified Otsu
thresholding, in which we define a threshold value for each WC
by considering a finite number of its neighbors. This is unlike popular approaches such as the Donoho and Johnstone (1995) method in
which a single threshold value is selected based on the first detail

and applied to all other details. This approach could be beneficial

when data contain hard random noises (spikes) but carries the risk
of attenuating weak reflections.
To suppress the remaining components of WGN from thresholding, we have applied 2D AWF in this paper, which is based on local
properties of a sample. Application of AWF requires a measure of
variance of the random noise. In this paper, we have assumed that
the ambient noise have Gaussian distribution with zero mean and
are uncorrelated with signal; therefore, we have used the Immerkaers (1996) method for estimating the variance of WGN. In addition, we have specified a WGN variance value for each SG instead
of using a global measurement for variance. This, however, is data
set dependent and needs to be tested in a trial-and-error manner. A
possible drawback of our Gaussian assumption is if the ambient
noise has a bias. Further, having an irregular spaced gather will also
be challenging. Because the AWF uses the statistical properties
around a WC for separation of signal and noise, presence of coherency is a must. Data gaps will either require the AWF window to be
adjusted or mandate complete omission of the AWF step. Unfortunately, these decisions are somewhat subjective and have to be made
in a heuristic manner.
Decision to apply thresholding and AWF depends on the noise
character. After decomposition, the SGs have different frequency
bands (Figure 5). In some SGs (e.g., first and second details; Figure 5a and 5c) WCs of signal are not strong, and therefore, there is
no benefit in applying the modified Otsu thresholding or the AWF;
we choose to mute these SGs in their entirety. However, in the SG of
approximate, the random noise is highly correlated with signal

Figure 10. Wavelet domain decomposition of the second field data set. Images in panels (a, c, e, g, and i) are details and in panels (b, d, f, h, and
j) are approximates obtained by decomposing the data in Figure 9a in five scales, respectively. Data in panels (a-j) are in wavelet domain. The
low-frequency linear moveout ground roll is suppressed by surgically muting the WCs in the approximate of the fifth scale ([j] inside white
polygon). No random noise suppression was necessary for this data set.

Downloaded 01/18/17 to 139.78.26.100. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/

RLS-based denoising

V259

Figure 11. f-k transform comparison. (a) f-k transform of Figure 4a, (b) f-k transform of low-frequency linear moveout coherent noise, which
was used to contaminate Figure 4a. (c) f-k transform of data contaminated only with ground roll. Coefficients within the white polygon are
muted. (d) Inverse f-k transform. (e) Comparison on spectra of uncontaminated signals (Figure 4a), signal contaminated with ground roll, and
data from f-k filtering showing that standard f-k filtering did not preserve low-frequency end of the signal spectra as well as the proposed RLSbased denoising method.

f-k transform

RLS

L 4 into five scales versus the f-k transform of the same data
set. The time expense of our method can be reduced by implementing the decomposition part in parallel architecture taking advantage
of the fact that RLS operates in a trace-by-trace manner.

0.03
0.07

0.58
1.43

CONCLUSIONS

Table 1. CPU time comparison (in s).

Data size
512 512
1024 1024

WCs. Preserving signal is sometimes more important than suppressing noise. Therefore, in this case, there wasnt any benefit
in applying the modified Otsu thresholding or the AWF. Thresholding and AWF were only applied on the detail SGs that clearly
showed that the signals are not correlated with noise.
Our method is computationally expensive in comparison to f-k
filtering. For example, a gather with size N, where N number of
sample in a trace number of traces, is decomposed into S scales
by a prediction and a update operator of length L, the total number
of operations is proportional to O20NLS. In comparison, the cost
of f-k transform is only O2Nlog2 N, which is the cost of the fast
Fourier transform. Table 1 shows the implementation of our method
for data decomposition using a Deslauriers-Dubuc wavelet with

Data transformation from the time to wavelet domain using RLS

has several benefits such as in-place computation, circumvention of
frequency aliasing, adaptively to nonstationarity, and ease of inverse
transform. Decomposition of a shot (or receiver or CDP) gather
from the time-offset domain into the wavelet domain results in
multiple SGs. The decomposition changes the relative magnitude
of WCs of various events (reflection, head wave, ground roll,
etc.) from one SG to another without impacting their moveout.
In SG(s) in which the WCs of ground roll are overwhelmingly
stronger than that of the desired events, they can be surgically
muted. Carefully muting in selected SG(s) attenuates undesired
events while having minimal effect on frequency spectra of the desired events. Additionally, random noise can be suppressed by designing a local thresholding mechanism such as the modified Otsu
thresholding in combination with AWF for individual SG. Appli-

Aghayan et al.

Downloaded 01/18/17 to 139.78.26.100. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/

V260

cation of this denoising method on real data sets effectively suppresses ground roll and random noises while preserving the lower
end of the signal frequency spectrum. The proposed denoising
method could be a valuable tool in a processors toolbox when data
are being preconditioned for advanced processing methods such as
full-waveform inversion in which retention of low frequencies are
greatly desired.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors are grateful to the editors and the four anonymous
reviewers for taking the time to help us shape the manuscript. The
authors thank the anonymous donors of the real field data. The
wavelet transform scripts can be obtained with permission from the
authors. The student author A. Aghayan was funded by the NSFUSAID grant number 1445659 (US-Egypt Cooperative Research:
Imaging the Geometry of the Kharga Basin [New Valley Oasis] and
its Groundwater Capacity). This Boone Pickens School of Geologys contribution number is 2016-36.

REFERENCES
Aghayan, A., H. R. SiahKoohi, and H. T. Raissi, 2012, Seismic denoising
using adaptive wiener filter in redundant-lifting wavelet domain: Proceedings of the International Geophysical Conference and Oil & Gas Exhibition, 14, doi: 10.1190/IST092012-001.37.
Antonini, M., M. Barlaud, P. Mathieu, and I. Daubechies, 1992, Image coding using wavelet transform: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 1,
205220, doi: 10.1109/83.136597.
Askari, R., and H. R. Siahkoohi, 2008, Ground roll attenuation using the S
and x-f-k transforms: Geophysical Prospecting, 56, 105114, doi: 10
.1111/j.1365-2478.2007.00659.x.
Bao, W., R. Zhou, J. Yang, D. Yu, and N. Li, 2009, Anti-aliasing lifting
scheme for mechanical vibration fault feature extraction: Mechanical Systems
and Signal Processing, 23, 14581473, doi: 10.1016/j.ymssp.2009.02.010.
Bekara, M., and M. van der Baan, 2009, Random and coherent noise attenuation by empirical mode decomposition: Geophysics, 74, no. 5, V89V98,
doi: 10.1190/1.3157244.
Chen, Y., and S. Fomel, 2015, Random noise attenuation using local signaland-noise orthogonalization: Geophysics, 80, no. 6, WD1WD9, doi: 10
.1190/geo2014-0227.1.
Claypoole, R. L., Jr., G. M. Davis, W. Sweldens, and R. G. Baraniuk, 2003,
Nonlinear wavelet transforms for image coding via lifting: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 12, 14491459, doi: 10.1109/TIP.2003.817237.
Cohen, A., I. Daubechies, and J. Feauveau, 1992, Biorthogonal bases of
compactly supported wavelets: Communications on Pure and Applied
Mathematics, 45, 485560, doi: 10.1002/(ISSN)1097-0312.
Coruh, C., and J. K. Costain, 1983, Noise attenuation by Vibroseis whitening
(VSW) processing: Geophysics, 48, 543554, doi: 10.1190/1.1441485.
Daubechies, I., and W. Sweldens, 1998, Factoring wavelet transforms into
lifting steps: Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications, 4, 247269,
doi: 10.1007/BF02476026.
Deighan, A. J., and D. R. Watts, 1997, Ground roll suppression using the
wavelet transform: Geophysics, 62, 18961903, doi: 10.1190/1.1444290.
Deslauriers, G., and S. Dubuc, 1989, Symmetric iterative interpolation processes: Constructive Approximation, 5, 4968, doi: 10.1007/BF01889598.
Donoho, D. L., and I. M. Johnstone, 1995, Adapting to unknown smoothness via wavelet shrinkage: Journal of the American Statistical Association, 90, 12001224, doi: 10.1080/01621459.1995.10476626.
Embree, P., J. P. Burg, and M. M. Backus, 1963, Wide-band velocity filteringthe pie-slice process: Geophysics, 28, 948974, doi: 10.1190/1.1439310.
Ercelebi, E., and S. Koc, 2006, Lifting-based wavelet domain adaptive Wiener filter for image enhancement: IEE Proceedings Vision, Image and
Signal Processing, 153, 3136, doi: 10.1049/ip-vis:20045116.
Fomel, S., and Y. Liu, 2010, Seislet transform and seislet frame: Geophysics,
75, no. 3, V25V38, doi: 10.1190/1.3380591.
Gader, P., W.-H. Lee, and J. N. Wilson, 2004, Detecting landmines with
ground-penetrating radar using feature-based rules, order statistics, and

adaptive whitening: IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 42, 25222534, doi: 10.1109/TGRS.2004.837333.
Gholami, A., 2014, Non-convex compressed sensing with frequency mask
for seismic data reconstruction and denoising: Geophysical Prospecting,
62, 13891405, doi: 10.1111/1365-2478.12146.
Gonzalez, R. C., and R. E. Woods, 2002, Digital image processing: Prentice
Hall.
Haar, A., 1910, Zur Theorie der orthogonalen funktionensysteme: Mathematische Annalen, 69, 331371, doi: 10.1007/BF01456326.
Harlan, W. S., J. F. Claerbout, and F. Rocca, 1984, Signal/noise separation
and velocity estimation: Geophysics, 49, 18691880, doi: 10.1190/1
.1441600.
Henley, D. C., 2003, Coherent noise attenuation in the radial trace domain:
Geophysics, 68, 14081416, doi: 10.1190/1.1598134.
Immerkaer, J., 1996, Fast noise variance estimation: Computer Vision and
Image Understanding, 64, 300302, doi: 10.1006/cviu.1996.0060.
Karsli, H., and Y. Bayrak, 2004, Using the WienerLevinson algorithm to
suppress ground roll: Journal of Applied Geophysics, 55, 187197, doi:
10.1016/j.jappgeo.2003.11.003.
Kim, J., and J. W. Woods, 1994, Image identification and restoration in the
subband domain: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 3, 312314,
doi: 10.1109/83.287026.
Kumar, P., and E. Foufoula-Georgiou, 1997, Wavelet analysis for geophysical applications: Reviews of Geophysics, 35, 385412, doi: 10.1029/
97RG00427.
Lian, C., K. Chen, H. Chen, and L. Chen, 2001, Lifting based discrete wavelet transform architecture for JPEG2000: Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE
International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, IEEE, II445II448.
Lim, J. S., 1990, Two-dimensional signal and image processing: Prentice
Hall 1, p. 710.
Liu, X., 1999, Ground roll supression using the Karhunen-Loeve transform:
Geophysics, 64, 564566, doi: 10.1190/1.1444562.
Liu, Y., and S. Fomel, 2010, OC-seislet: Seislet transform construction with
differential offset continuation: Geophysics, 75, no. 6, WB235WB245,
doi: 10.1190/1.3506561.
Liu, Y., and S. Fomel, 2013, Seismic data analysis using local timefrequency decomposition: Geophysical Prospecting, 61, 516525, doi:
10.1111/j.1365-2478.2012.01062.x.
Melo, P. E., M. J. Porsani, and M. G. Silva, 2009, Ground-roll attenuation
using a 2D time-derivative filter: Geophysical Prospecting, 57, 343353,
doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2478.2008.00740.x.
Mokji, M. M., and S. Bakar, 2007, Adaptive thresholding based on co-occurrence matrix edge information: Journal of Computer, 2, 4452, doi: 10
.4304/jcp.2.8.44-52.
Nie, P., L. Zhang, Y. Li, B. Yang, and X. Luan, 2014, Using the directional
derivative trace transform for seismic wavefield separation: IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 52, 32893298, doi: 10
.1109/TGRS.2013.2272087.
Otsu, N., 1975, A threshold selection method from gray-level histograms:
Automatica, 11, 2327.
Ruggeri, F., 1999, Robust Bayesian and Bayesian decision theoretic wavelet
shrinkage, in Mller, P., and B. Vidakovic, eds., Bayesian inference in wavelet-based models: Springer, Lecture Note in Statistics 141, 139154.
Sheriff, R. E., and L. P. Geldart, 1995, Exploration seismology: Cambridge
University Press.
Shieh, C.-F., and R. B. Herrmann, 1990, Ground roll: Rejection using polarization filters: Geophysics, 55, 12161222, doi: 10.1190/1.1442937.
Soman, K. 2010, Insight into wavelets: From theory to practice: PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd.
Stein, C. M., 1981, Estimation of the mean of a multivariate normal distribution: The Annals of Statistics, 9, 11351151, doi: 10.1214/aos/1176345632.
Stepien, J., T. Zielinski, and R. Rumian, 2000, Image denoising using scaleadaptive lifting schemes: Proceedings of the International Conference on
Image Processing.
Sweldens, W., 1996, The lifting scheme: A custom-design construction of
biorthogonal wavelets: Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis,
3, 186200, doi: 10.1006/acha.1996.0015.
Sweldens, W., 1998, The lifting scheme: A construction of second generation wavelets: SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis, 29, 511546,
doi: 10.1137/S0036141095289051.
Treitel, S., J. L. Shanks, and C. W. Frasier, 1967, Some aspects of fan filtering: Geophysics, 32, 789800, doi: 10.1190/1.1439889.
Vidakovic, B., 2009, Statistical modeling by wavelets: John Wiley & Sons 503.
Wang, D., R. Saab, O. Yilmaz, and F. Herrmann, 2008, Bayesian wavefield
separation by transform-domain sparsity promotion: Geophysics, 73,
no. 5, A33A38, doi: 10.1190/1.2952571.
Yilmaz, ., 2001, Seismic data analysis: SEG 1.