Seismic data denoising based on the fractional Fourier transformation

•We propose a new signal filtering scheme in seismic data processing.•The proposed scheme is composed of the FrFT transform and the frequency filter.•We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme under Gaussian noise.•We compare the performances of the proposed scheme and the frequency filter.

Seismic data may suffer from too severe noise contamination to carry out further processing and interpretation procedure. In the paper, a new scheme was proposed based on the fractional Fourier transform (FrFT) in time frequency domain to mitigate noise. The scheme consists of two steps. In the first step, the seismic signal is filtered with the ordinary Butterworth filter in the frequency domain. The residual noises after frequency filtering are with the same frequencies with the filtered seismic signals. In order to mitigate the residual noises further, the FrFT filter is applied in the second step. The results from the simulated seismic signals and the measurements data verify the validity of the proposed scheme in both frequency and time–frequency domains.