Intermediate-Frequency Seismic Record Discrimination by Radial Trace Time–Frequency Filtering

In this letter, we research a spatiotemporal-domain-based time-frequency peak filtering (TFPF) method in order to remove the large error (bias) of the conventional TFPF in intermediate-frequency seismic record discrimination. An intermediate-frequency seismic signal is one whose dominant frequency is about 40 Hz or higher. To find a balance between noise attenuation and reflected signal preservation, the radial-trace TPFT (RT-TFPF) takes both the unbiased condition and the adjacent seismic traces´ correlation into consideration, and uses the RT transform to obtain a reduced-frequency input to decrease the TFPF error. Therefore, this method can discriminate some reflection events weakened by the conventional TFPF algorithm. First, we decrease the intermediate frequencies along RTs nearly aligned with the reflection event. Then, we obtain a less biased TFPF estimation with suitable window length τ. Finally, we recover the original intermediate frequency with the inverse RT transform. With the RT-TFPF, we can enhance reflection events without sacrificing frequency components while attenuating as much random noise as possible. Experiments on both synthetic model and field data demonstrate that the RT-TFPF performs well both in random noise attenuation and intermediate-frequency preservation, in addition to presenting advantages over the conventional TFPF.