Local outlier factor as part of a workflow for detecting and attenuating blending noise in simultaneously acquired data

ABSTRACT A number of deblending methods and workflows have been reported in the past decades to eliminate the source interference noise recorded during a simultaneous shooting acquisition. It is common that denoising algorithms focusing on optimizing coherency and weighting down/ignoring outliers can be considered as deblending tools. Such algorithms are not only enforcing coherency but also handling outliers either explicitly or implicitly. In this paper, we present a novel approach based on detecting amplitude outliers and its application on deblending based on a local outlier factor that assigns an outlier‐ness (i.e. a degree of being an outlier) to each sample of the data. A local outlier factor algorithm quantifies outlier‐ness for an object in a data set based on the degree of isolation compared with its locally neighbouring objects. Assuming that the seismic pre‐stack data acquired by simultaneous shooting are composed of a set of non‐outliers and outliers, the local outlier factor algorithm evaluates the outlier‐ness of each object. Therefore, we can separate the data set into blending noise (i.e. outlier) and signal (i.e. non‐outlier) components. By applying a proper threshold, objects having high local outlier factors are labelled as outlier/blending noise, and the corresponding data sample could be replaced by zero or a statistically adequate value. Beginning with an explanation of parameter definitions and properties of local outlier factor, we investigate the feasibility of a local outlier factor application on seismic deblending by analysing the parameters of local outlier factor and suggesting specific deblending strategies. Field data examples recorded during simultaneous shooting acquisition show that the local outlier factor algorithm combined with a thresholding can detect and attenuate blending noise. Although the local outlier factor application on deblending shows a few shortcomings, it is consequently noted that the local outlier factor application in this paper obviously achieves benefits in terms of detecting and attenuating blending noise and paves the way for further geophysical applications.