Incoherent noise suppression with curvelet-domain sparsity

The separation of signal and noise is a key issue in seismic data processing. By noise we refer to the incoherent noise that is present in the data. We use the recently introduced multiscale and multidirectional curvelet transform for suppression of random noise. The curvelet transform decomposes data into directional plane waves that are local in nature. The coherent features of the data occupy the large coefficients in the curvelet domain, whereas the incoherent noise lives in the small coefficients. In other words, signal and noise have minimal overlap in the curvelet domain. This gives us a chance to use curvelets to suppress noise present in data.