Localization and de-noising seismic signals on SASW measurement by wavelet transform

SASW method is a nondestructive in situ testing method that is used to determine the dynamic properties of soil sites and pavement systems. Phase information and dispersion characteristics of a wave propagating through these systems have a significant role in the processing of recorded data. Inversion of the dispersive phase data provides information on the variation of shear-wave velocity with depth. However, in the case of sanded residual soil, it is not easy to produce the reliable phase spectrum curve. Due to natural noises and other human intervention in surface wave date generation deal with to reliable phase spectrum curve for sanded residual soil turn into the complex issue for geological scientist. In this paper, a time-frequency analysis based on complex Gaussian Derivative wavelet was applied to detect and localize all the events that are not identifiable by conventional signal processing methods. Then, the performance of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) in noise reduction of these recorded seismic signals was evaluated. Furthermore, in particular the influence of the decomposition level choice was investigated on efficiency of this process. This method is developed by various wavelet thresholding techniques which provide many options for controllable de-noising at each level of signal decomposition. Also, it obviates the need for high computation time compare with continuous wavelet transform. According to the results, the proposed method is powerful to visualize the interested spectrum range of seismic signals and to de-noise at low level decomposition. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.