Self-Supervised Seismic Swell Noise Suppression From Noisy Seismic Data

Seismic swell noise, often observed in marine seismic data, is characterized by high amplitude and low frequencies. This noise significantly hides useful signals, underscoring the importance of attenuating it in the processing pipeline for marine seismic data. To date, most deep learning methods proposed for swell noise suppression have focused on supervised paradigms, which require a large dataset of paired noisy and clean data to gain insights into signal features and swell noise statistics at the training phase. In field data processing, however, obtaining generalizable training data often proves to be challenging. The inherent complexity and variability of the real world often make it difficult to acquire unbiased, noise-free datasets in the context of marine seismic data processing. To address this problem, we present a self-supervised deep learning method for suppressing swell noise even in the absence of access to clean seismic training data. First, we propose a strategy for the synthetic swell noise generation based on the amplitude, frequency, and coherence features of noisy traces. We implement the noisy-as-clean (NAC) strategy, wherein either the original noisy seismic data or its reorganized variant acts as the network’s target. Simultaneously, the network receives the observed noisy seismic data combined with simulated swell noise as its input. By leveraging these “noisy-noisy” pairs, we train a DnCNN network. Experimental evaluations conducted on both synthetic and field data demonstrate that, through the integration of swell noise simulation and the NAC strategy, the trained network consistently achieves superior denoising performance.