Application of Seismic Data Stacking in Time–Frequency Domain

Stacking is a fundamental concept that can be found in geosciences and seismic signal processing. The performance of random noise suppression and residual moveout correction by traditional amplitude-based stacking process is always far from satisfactory. In this letter, we present a time-frequency-domain phase-based stacking approach to exploit the similar spectral content of the different traces in seismic array data. The method can overcome the disadvantages of many existing stacking methods. The phase is derived from the well-known time-frequency-domain technique S transform, and the average of the phase spectrum is used to weight the spectrum of prestack seismic traces. As a coherency measure, the weighted phase spectrum can better reflect the lateral coherence of effective signal between individual traces. Meanwhile, the unique time-frequency properties of S spectrum make the weighting process more competitive in suppressing random noise and nonuniform artifacts. The analysis results of synthetic and real field data show the effectiveness of the proposed stacking approach.