Seismic ground roll time-frequency filtering using the gaussian wavelet transform

Seismic signal processing is an important task in geophysics sounding and represents a permanent challenge in petroleum exploration. Although seismograms could in principle give us a picture of a geological structure, they are very contaminated by spurious signals (having the ground roll as the main component). This fact demands a big effort in developing new filtering methodologies. Using the Gaussian wavelet transform, a filtering method for ground roll removal is developed. The filter allows a local extraction of the ground roll, it is adaptative to trace and it has an attenuation factor that keeps the average frequency spectrum. This method is tested for a land-based seismic signal leading to promising results. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.