Seismic Signal Enhancement Using 2 D Fast Discrete Curvelet Transform---An Application to VSP and Common-Shot Gathers From a Hardrock Environment

Summary Obtaining seismic images with good quality in hardrock environments has been challenging. This condition applies to many mineral explorations using seismic methods including our study area where the data quality is strongly affected by soft, near-surface materials and a reflector with low contrast in rock physical properties. Until recently, no effective processing has been applied to the seismic data for improving signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) other than f-x deconvolution. Multiresolution analyses, requiring little in-situ rock physical information, are widely used as SNR improvement methods for pre- and post-stacked seismic traces. The directionally-representative nature of the curvelet transform makes itself an effective multiresolution method for seismic processing. We applied a denoising sequence using the fast discrete curvelet transform (FDCT) on two seismic data sets: a vertical seismic profiling (VSP) survey and a 3D shot record. The results show significant improvement on the SNR of the data.