Sparsity-optimized separation of body waves and ground-roll by constructing dictionaries using tunable Q-factor wavelet transforms with different Q-factors

Summary Low-frequency oscillatory ground-roll is regarded as one of the main regular interference waves, which obscures primary reflections in land seismic data. Suppressing the ground-roll can reasonably improve the signal-to-noise ratio of seismic data. Conventional suppression methods, such as high-pass and various f-k filtering, usually cause waveform distortions and loss of body wave information because of their simple cut-off operation. In this study, a sparsity-optimized separation of body waves and ground-roll, which is based on morphological component analysis theory, is realized by constructing dictionaries using tunable Q-factor wavelet transforms with different Q-factors. Our separation model is grounded on the fact that the input seismic data are composed of low-oscillatory body waves and high-oscillatory ground-roll. Two different waveform dictionaries using a low Q-factor and a high Q-factor, respectively, are confirmed as able to sparsely represent each component based on their diverse morphologies. Thus, seismic data including body waves and ground-roll can be nonlinearly decomposed into low-oscillatory and high-oscillatory components. This is a new noise attenuation approach according to the oscillatory behaviour of the signal rather than the scale or frequency. We illustrate the method using both synthetic and field shot data. Compared with results from conventional high-pass and f-k filtering, the results of the proposed method prove this method to be effective and advantageous in preserving the waveform and bandwidth of reflections.