Nonstationary Seismic Random Noise Attenuation by EPLL

The expected patch log likelihood (EPLL) is a patch-prior based denoising method which ensures denoising performance in ensemble approximation by local patch denoising. Basing on that, we propose a classification based EPLL method to attenuate seismic random noise, of which the level varies spatiotemporally. In EPLL method, the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) learned from samples is taken as a prior to statistically model patches, then the seismic signal is reconstructed by weighted averaging the noisy image and summation of denoised patches. Since the accuracy of the local statistic modeling and global signal reconstruction is related to the variance of the noise of the patches that have various noise variance in seismic image, we classify the patches into several groups in order to minimize the within-class variance. Therefore, appropriate regularization parameter and most likely prior are assigned to each patch according to the noise variance of the patch in EPLL. Experimental results of synthetic and field seismic data show that the classification based EPLL achieves a desired performance in seismic events preservation and nonstationary random noise attenuation.