Unsupervised Coherent Noise Removal from Seismological Distributed
Acoustic Sensing Data
Abstract
Recent advances in sensing technologies, particularly Distributed
Acoustic Sensing (DAS), have significantly improved the collection and
analysis of seismological data. DAS is a powerful method for detecting
vibrations from various sources, including earthquakes. However, the
vast amount of data produced by DAS requires sophisticated analytical
methods to differentiate between signals of interest and noise, such as
traffic signals. We introduce an innovative approach by extending the
Noise2Self framework to effectively remove unwanted, structured coherent
noise from DAS data. By creating masks based on the characteristics of
traffic signals, we isolate and preserve earthquake signals while
maintaining the denoising performance of the original Noise2Self
approach, which reduces noise without requiring clean reference data. To
evaluate our method, we used synthetic data generated from seismic
recordings of closely spaced seismometers and then applied our approach
to data from a DAS array crossing the Alpine Fault near Haast, New
Zealand. Our results demonstrate that our model successfully removes
traffic noise and other non-coherent noise while preserving seismic
signals, leading to improvements in both Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and
waveform coherence. Evaluations on real-world DAS data further confirm
the robustness of our method, positioning it as a valuable tool for
analyzing large-scale DAS datasets in various geoscientific contexts.
This approach, which we refer to as “CoherentNoise2Self’ to emphasize
the extension of Noise2Self to coherent noise, advances the capabilities
for near real-time monitoring and analysis of seismic DAS data.