Multicomponent seismic noise attenuation with multivariate order statistic filters

• We develop a multivariate order statistic filter for multicomponent seismic data.
• We search the optimum track of local event in the vector space.
• A fast algorithm is described for reducing computational cost.
• The vector information of multicomponent seismic data can be effectively preserved.

The vector relationship between multicomponent seismic data is highly important for multicomponent processing and interpretation, but this vector relationship could be damaged when each component is processed individually. To overcome the drawback of standard component-by-component filtering, multivariate order statistic filters are introduced and extended to attenuate the noise of multicomponent seismic data by treating such dataset as a vector wavefield rather than a set of scalar fields. According to the characteristics of seismic signals, we implement this type of multivariate filtering along local events. First, the optimal local events are recognized according to the similarity between the vector signals which are windowed from neighbouring seismic traces with a sliding time window along each trial trajectory. An efficient strategy is used to reduce the computational cost of similarity measurement for vector signals. Next, one vector sample each from the neighbouring traces are extracted along the optimal local event as the input data for a multivariate filter. Different multivariate filters are optimal for different noise. The multichannel modified trimmed mean (MTM) filter, as one of the multivariate order statistic filters, is applied to synthetic and field multicomponent seismic data to test its performance for attenuating white Gaussian noise. The results indicate that the multichannel MTM filter can attenuate noise while preserving the relative amplitude information of multicomponent seismic data more effectively than a single-channel filter.