3D seismic denoising based on a low-redundancy curvelet transform

Contamination of seismic signal with noise is one of the main challenges during seismic data processing. Several methods exist for eliminating different types of noises, but optimal random noise attenuation remains difficult. Based on multi-scale, multi-directional locality of curvelet transform, the curvelet thresholding method is a relatively new method for random noise elimination. However, the high redundancy of a 3D curvelet transform makes its computational time and memory for massive data processing costly. To improve the efficiency of the curvelet thresholding denoising, a low-redundancy curvelet transform was introduced. The redundancy of the low-redundancy curvelet transform is approximately one-quarter of the original transform and the tightness of the original transform is also kept, thus the low-redundancy curvelet transform calls for less memory and computational resource compared with the original one. Numerical results on 3D synthetic and field data demonstrate that the low-redundancy curvelet denoising consumes one-quarter of the CPU time compared with the original curvelet transform using iterative thresholding denoising when comparable results are obtained. Thus, the low-redundancy curvelet transform is a good candidate for massive seismic denoising.