| Abstract: | One of the main objectives of seismic digital processing is the improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio in the recorded data. Wiener filters have been successfully applied in this capacity, but alternate filtering devices also merit our attention. Two such systems are the matched filter and the output energy filter. The former is better known to geophysicists as the crosscorrelation filter, and has seen widespread use for the processing of vibratory source data, while the latter is. much less familiar in seismic work. The matched filter is designed such that ideally the presence of a given signal is indicated by a single large deflection in the output. The output energy filter ideally reveals the presence of such a signal by producing a longer burst of energy in the time interval where the signal occurs. The received seismic trace is assumed to be an additive mixture of signal and noise. The shape of the signal must be known in order to design the matched filter, but only the autocorrelation function of this signal need be known to obtain the output energy filter. The derivation of these filters differs according to whether the noise is white or colored. In the former case the noise autocorrelation function consists of only a single spike at lag zero, while in the latter the shape of this noise autocorrelation function is arbitrary. We propose a novel version of the matched filter. Its memory function is given by the minimum-delay wavelet whose autocorrelation function is computed from selected gates of an actual seismic trace. For this reason explicit knowledge of the signal shape is not required for its design; nevertheless, its performance level is not much below that achievable with ordinary matched filters. We call this new filter the “mini-matched” filter. With digital computation in mind, the design criteria are formulated and optimized with time as a discrete variable. We illustrate the techniques with simple numerical examples, and discuss many of the interesting properties that these filters exhibit. |
