oa Application of Curvelet Denoising to 3D Post-stack Data Acquired in Hardrock Environment

Seismic data acquired in hardrock environment are demanding for processing. Frequently occurring lack of clear coherent events hinders imaging and interpretation. Additional difficulty arises from the presence of significant amount of cultural noise (e.g. associated with exploration and processing of ore) which corrupt the data. For this purpose we demonstrate our noise attenuation approach based on 2D Discrete Curvelet Transform (DCT) by applying it to 3D post-stack seismic data from active mining camp. DCT introduce minimal overlapping between coefficients representing signal and noise in the curvelet domain, hence being well-suited for data denoising. Forward DCT is applied in sequences to inline, crossline and time slice sections. 3D DMO volume after curvelet denoising is much easier to interpret, e.g. it’s easier to follow diffracted energy originating at ore lenses. We believe that the presented approach of running 2D DCT for 3D data might be also a sufficient substitution for a more expensive 3D DCT.