Unsupervised seismic random noise attenuation by a recursive deep image prior

The presence of random noise in field data significantly reduces the precision of subsequent seismic processing steps. As a result, random noise suppression is essential to improve the quality of field data. Because most traditional algorithms characterize seismic data linearly, the denoising accuracy is still open to be improved. As an unsupervised deep-learning method, the deep image prior (DIP) algorithm can characterize seismic data nonlinearly. The DIP uses randomly generated noise as input and noisy seismic data as desired output for random noise attenuation over several rounds of training epochs. However, determining the optimal training epoch for obtaining the final denoised result of unlabeled noisy data remains a challenge. To terminate the DIP training in time and obtain the denoised result, we design an improved quality control criterion (IQCC) based on adjacent estimations of seismic signal. To further improve the denoising accuracy, a recursive strategy is developed that uses the previous desired output as the new input and the previous denoised result as the new desired output. To obtain the optimal denoised results using the suggested recursive algorithm, a convergence condition also is established. Numerous examples of synthetic prestack and poststack data demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed IQCC and our recursive strategy with a convergence condition in protecting the effective signal, especially when compared with the curvelet thresholding algorithm and the original DIP. Furthermore, the denoising accuracy is on par with that of the supervised learning algorithm, demonstrating the adaptability of our recursive DIP under the convergence condition. Its superiority is further supported by field poststack seismic data processing, which uses the local similarity for performance assessments.