Microseismic event denoising via adaptive directional vector median filters

We present a novel denoising scheme via Radon transform-based adaptive vector directional median filters named adaptive directional vector median filter (AD-VMF) to suppress noise for microseismic downhole dataset. AD-VMF contains three major steps for microseismic downhole data processing: (i) applying Radon transform on the microseismic data to obtain the parameters of the waves, (ii) performing S-transform to determine the parameters for filters, and (iii) applying the parameters for vector median filter (VMF) to denoise the data. The steps (i) and (ii) can realize the automatic direction detection. The proposed algorithm is tested with synthetic and field datasets that were recorded with a vertical array of receivers. The P-wave and S-wave direct arrivals are properly denoised for poor signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) records. In the simulation case, we also evaluate the performance with mean square error (MSE) in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The result shows that the distortion of the proposed method is very low; the SNR is even less than 0 dB.