Learning to Decouple and Generate Seismic Random Noise via Invertible Neural Network

Recovering the useful signal from seismic field data is critical in seismic data processing. Seismic field data are usually coupled by a useful signal and field noise (random noise with unknown distribution), making them difficult to decouple. Unfortunately, subject to the assumption biases of data prior and noise prior, different random noise attenuation methods may have different performance biases. Suppose data-driven supervised deep learning methods have plenty of labeled [real noisy (field) and clean (useful)] data pairs. In that case, they will learn useful information from the labeled dataset and relax the biases of the data-prior and noise-prior assumptions. To this end, we first use the invertible neural network (INN) to disentangle the field data in observational space into the latent variable in latent space. Then, by manipulating the latent variable’s partitions encoding high- and low-frequency information, INN can generate quality-controlled fake field data and decouple useful signal and field noise parts from field data in its backward pass. To gain decoupling and generative capabilities, the training of our INN only requires a relatively small labeled dataset containing field–useful data pairs. Sampling in latent space, the trained INN can generate an infinite number of paired (fake field and useful) samples. Experiments show that our method can effectively decouple useful signal and field noise, and the noise of the fake field data is close to field noise. The generated paired dataset can benefit downstream tasks, such as field noise attenuation.