Explainable artificial intelligence‐driven mask design for self‐supervised seismic denoising

Abstract The presence of coherent noise in seismic data leads to errors and uncertainties, and as such it is paramount to suppress noise as early and efficiently as possible. Self‐supervised denoising circumvents the common requirement of deep learning procedures of having noisy‐clean training pairs. However, self‐supervised coherent noise suppression methods require extensive knowledge of the noise statistics. We propose the use of explainable artificial intelligence approaches to ‘see inside the black box’ that is the denoising network and use the gained knowledge to replace the need for any prior knowledge of the noise itself. This is achieved in practice by leveraging bias‐free networks and the direct linear link between input and output provided by the associated Jacobian matrix; we show that a simple averaging of the Jacobian contributions over a number of randomly selected input pixels provides an indication of the most effective mask to suppress noise present in the data. The proposed method, therefore, becomes a fully automated denoising procedure requiring no clean training labels or prior knowledge. Realistic synthetic examples with noise signals of varying complexities, ranging from simple time‐correlated noise to complex pseudo‐rig noise propagating at the velocity of the ocean, are used to validate the proposed approach. Its automated nature is highlighted further by an application to two field data sets. Without any substantial pre‐processing or any knowledge of the acquisition environment, the automatically identified blind masks are shown to perform well in suppressing both trace‐wise noise in common shot gathers from the Volve marine data set and coloured noise in post‐stack seismic images from a land seismic survey.