Flattening the Seismic Data for Optimal Noise Attenuation

The seismic energy is the most correlative along the structural direction, and thus, many traditional filtering methods can be optimally performed in a flattened gather. We introduce in detail a flattening operator for creating the flattened dimension, where a denoising operator can be applied subsequently. The flattening operator is created by deriving a plane-wave trace continuation relation following the plane-wave equation. We demonstrate that the plane-wave trace continuation can well preserve the strong amplitude variation existing in the seismic data. In order to obtain a reliable slope estimation in the presence of noise, a robust slope estimation approach is introduced to substitute the traditional method. The flattening operator can be combined with many state-of-the-art filtering methods to obtain superior performance. Both synthetic and field seismic data are used to demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework in realistic applications.