Multiscale Spatial Attention Network for Seismic Data Denoising

Seismic background noise often damages the desired signals, thereby resulting in some artifacts in the seismic imaging that follows. Since about 2016, some supervised-deep-learning methods have shown impressive performance in seismic data denoising, but they usually only consider single-scale features and neglect the multiscale strategy. To further reinforce their denoising performance, a novel multiscale convolutional neural network (CNN) combined with a spatial attention mechanism, called multiscale spatial attention denoising network (MSSA-Net), is proposed to tell weak reflected signals apart from strong seismic background noise. Unlike conventional single-scale CNNs, this proposed MSSA-Net can achieve the extraction of multiscale features, which is beneficial for the suppression of strong noise and the recovery of weak reflected signals. Specifically, MSSA-Net contains a principal denoising network and two auxiliary networks. The former utilizes the widen convolution composed of multiple parallel convolution layers with different kernel sizes to capture the informative multiscale features; the latter two leverage upsampling and downsampling to extract local fine and global coarse features, respectively. Furthermore, a spatial attention block is adopted to fuse these multiscale features, thereby distinguishing weak reflected signals from strong seismic background noise. Multiple experiments of synthetic and real seismic records demonstrate the effectiveness of MSSA-Net. In addition, compared with two classical single-scale CNNs, MSSA-Net performs better in signal recovery, indicating the positive effect of the multiscale strategy.