Geophysical Prospecting, 2019, 67, 85–96 doi: 10.1111/1365-2478.

12714

First-break picking for microseismic data based on cascading

use of Shearlet and Stockwell transforms
Yao Cheng1 , Yue Li1 and Chao Zhang1,2∗
1 College
of Communication Engineering, Jilin University, Changchun, Jilin, China, and 2 Department of Physics, University of Alberta,
Edmonton, Canada

Received October 2016, revision accepted October 2018

ABSTRACT
First-break picking of microseismic data is a significant step in microseismic moni-
toring. There is a great error in conventional first-break picking methods based on
time domain analysis in low signal to noise ratio. S-transform may provide a novel
approach, it can extract the time–frequency features of the signal and reduce the
picking error because of its high time–frequency resolution and good time–frequency
clustering; however, the S-transform is not well suited for microseismic data with high
noise. For applications to array data where the weak signal has spatial coherency as
well as some distinct temporal characteristics, we propose to combine the shearlet
transform with a time–frequency transform. In the proposed method, the shearlet
transform is used to capture spatial coherency features of the signal. The information
of the signal and noise in shearlet domain is represented by shearlet coefficients. We
use the correlation of signal coefficients at adjacent fine scales to give prominence to
signal features to accurately discriminate the signal from noise. The prominent sig-
nal coefficients make the signal better gathered in time–frequency spectrum of the
S-transform. Finally, we can get reliable and accurate first breaks based on the change
of energy. The performance of the proposed method was tested on synthetic and field
microseismic data. The experimental results indicated that our method is outstanding
in terms of both picking precision and adaptability to noise.

Key words: First-break picking, Scale correlation, Shearlet transform, S-transform.

1 INTRODUCTION signal to noise ratio (SNR). However, for the data with high
noise, because of the small underlying distinction between mi-
First-break picking is a fundamental step in microseismic data
croseismic signal and noise, the auto-picks obtained by time
processing. Automatic and accurate picking of first arrivals is
domain analysis methods are unsatisfactory.
an important prerequisite for high-precision hypocentre loca-
First-arrival picking methods based on time–frequency
tion (Maxwell et al. 2010). Various first-break picking algo-
analysis improve the picking accuracy in high-noise back-
rithms have been proposed, such as short- and long-time av-
ground to some extent. Time–frequency analysis can simul-
erage method (Allen 1978; Earle and Shearer 1994), Akaike
taneously analyse signal characteristics in time and frequency.
information criterion (Leonard 2000; Zhang, Thurber and
The time–frequency spectrum reflects more comprehensive
Rowe 2003), higher order statistics (Saragiotis, Hadjileon-
signal features. Therefore, it is suitable for signal recogni-
tiadis and Panas 2002), polarization analysis (Deflandre and
tion and first-break picking. Wavelet and S-transforms are
Dubesset 1992) and fractal dimension (Boschetti, Dentith and
commonly used in time–frequency analysis methods. Wavelet
List 1996). These methods get satisfactory results for high
transform decomposes the signals into time-scale domain, not
the time–frequency domain in the strict sense, which makes it
∗ E-mail: cz1@ualberta.ca impossible to give an intuitive time–frequency representation.


C 2018 European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers 85
86 Y. Cheng, Y. Li and C. Zhang

S-transform is the phase correction of the continuous wavelet where the window width σ is assumed to be σ = 1/| f |.
transform and maintains a direct relationship with the Fourier The window width varies inversely with the frequency,
spectrum. S-transform provides frequency-dependent reso- which makes the S-transform to have the ability of multi-
lution, showing excellent time–frequency analysis capacity. resolution analysis. The time window is wide at low-frequency
All these features make sure that the S-transform possesses band to obtain high-frequency resolution and the time win-
some desirable characteristics that are absent in the continu- dow is narrow at high-frequency band, which can obtain high
ous wavelet transform. Pinnegar and Mansinha (2003) used time resolution. Based on (1) and (2), the S-transform is rede-
S-transform to determine P-wave time arrival in a noisy seis- fined as:
mogram. On the basis of the time–frequency difference be-  +∞
| f | −(t−τ )2 f 2
tween the P-wave arrival and noise, the first break is well S (τ, f ) = h (t) √ e 2 e−i2π f t dt. (3)
−∞ 2π
indicated in time–frequency spectrum. Microseismic data are
The Gaussian window of S-transform satisfies (Pinnegar
characterized by high-signal frequency and usually disturbed
and Mansinha 2003)
by a lot of noise (Akram and Eaton 2016). Due to the weaker
 +∞
amplitude and higher frequency of microseismic signals, there | f | −(t−τ )2 f 2
√ e 2 dτ = 1. (4)
is no significant time–frequency difference between signal and −∞ 2π
noise, which makes the S-transform difficult to pick reliable Therefore, the integral of time–frequency spectrum over
first break. time becomes the frequency spectrum.
To overcome this shortcoming, this paper proposes a    
+∞ +∞ +∞
| f | −(t−τ )2 f 2
first-break picking method based on cascading use of shearlet S (τ, f )dτ = h (t) √ e 2 dτ e−i2π f t dt
and S-transforms. The method takes the advantage of shear- −∞ −∞ −∞ 2π
 +∞
let transform in capturing the geometric structures for two- = h (t)e−i2π f t dt = H ( f ) , (5)
dimensional signal. By the correlation of signal coefficients −∞

at adjacent scales, the signal produces features that are more
obvious. Therefore, the time–frequency performance of valid
signal is distinct from noise after the S-transform. Based on
the energy difference between signal and noise, we realize the
first-break picking automatically. The effectiveness and the
accuracy of the proposed method are demonstrated by exper-
iments on the synthetic and field microseismic data.
2 THEORY
2.1 S-transform
Stockwell, Mansinha and Lowe (1996) proposed a non-
stationary signal analysis method, S-transform, which is an
extension of the short time Fourier and wavelet transforms.
The S-transform of a time series h(t) is defined as:
 +∞
S (τ, f ) = h (t)ω (t − τ, f ) e−i2π f t dt, (1)
−∞
where S(·) represents S-transform, t is the time and f is the
frequency, and τ denotes the position of the window function
on the time axis. S-transform adopts a normalized Gaussian
window with the following representation:
1 −t 2
ω (t) = √ e 2σ 2 , (2)
σ 2π
where H( f ) represents the Fourier transform of h(t). Hence,
the original signal can be recovered by inverse Fourier trans-
form:
 +∞  +∞  +∞ 
h (t) = H ( f )ei2π f t d f = S (τ, f ) dτ ei2π f t d f.
−∞ −∞ −∞
(6)
Based on the above relationships, there is a link be-
tween S-transform and Fourier transform, which ensures
that S-transform is invertible. The S-transform realizes the
transformation of the signal from time domain to time–
frequency domain, then the inverse S-transform can be used
to revert the signal to the time domain without any loss of
information.
2.2 Shearlet transform
Shearlet transform is an almost optimal sparse method, which
applies the framework of affine system and has the ability
to capture the geometry of multidimensional data effectively
(Lim 2010; Merouane, Yilmaz and Baysal 2015; Hosseini
et al. 2015; Zhang et al. 2015). It has a simpler mathematical
structure and is able to achieve the optimal approximation
and multiresolution analysis of the signals. The construction
of shearlet system involves three important parameters, which
control the resolution, orientation and the position of the


C 2018 European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers, Geophysical Prospecting, 67, 85–96

shearlet, respectively. Shearlet transform shows directional
sensitivity, and it can analyse the anisotropic information
of the data at multiple scales. More mathematical details of
shearlet transform can be found in the Appendix.
3 TIME PICKING METHOD BASED ON
CASCADING USE OF SHEARLET AND
S-TRANSFORMS
Due to the excellent time–frequency characteristics of
S-transform, the signal is gathered for energy group in time–
frequency spectrum. Thus, we can achieve the arrival time
picking through observing the spectrum. However, when the
signal is buried in strong noise, multiple energy groups appear
in the spectrum, which interfere with the signal and lead to er-
roneous first-break picking. To improve the picking accuracy
in high noise, the proposed method makes a cascading use
of shearlet and S-transforms. The algorithm maps the signal
to shearlet domain by shearlet transform at first. The signal
characteristics are enhanced by the scale correlation between
adjacent scales, and then we combine S-transform to get more
stable first arrival time.
Shearlet transform is used for microseismic data decom-
position. Microseismic signal has higher frequency, and then
the effective information of the signal is expressed at fine
scales. Therefore, we only focus on the coefficients at fine
scales. After the decomposition, the signal and noise show dif-
ferent coefficient characteristics in shearlet domain. In general,
the effective signal is mapped to centralized coefficients with
larger amplitudes in some specific directions, while random
noise is distributed on decentralized coefficients with smaller
amplitudes in all directions. Therefore, the energy of the co-
efficients corresponding to signal directions is much larger
than that of other directions. The energy of the record at var-
ious scales and directions are different and it can be calcul-
ated by
 perform the differential operation on the normalized energy
E ( j, k) = C ( j, k, n)2 , (7)
n
where E( j, k) is the energy of a subband with jth scale and kth
direction, and C( j, k, n) denotes the shearlet coefficient at dif-
ferent scale, direction and location. The directional subbands
with large energy contain more valid signals. When the scale
becomes finer, more significant coefficients are generated in
signal directions at fine scales. Moreover, the same direction
of adjacent scales shows a strong correlation; we can deter-
mine the signal directions according to the correlation energy

C 2018 European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers, Geophysical Prospecting, 67, 85–96
First-break picking by Shearlet and Stockwell transforms 87
between adjacent fine scales (Zhao et al. 2016), which is de-
scribed as:
ECorr j, j+1 (k) = E ( j, k) E ( j + 1, k) . (8)
After getting the signal directions, the coefficients of fine
scales are replaced by the sum of the coefficients of the sig-
nal directional subbands. Furthermore, we make use of the
correlation of signal coefficients at adjacent scales. We do the
direct multiplication of the coefficients for the same position
at adjacent fine scales, which enhances the edge characteris-
tic of the signal and inhibits the effect of the noise (Xu et al.
1994). The above process makes the signal prominent from
the noise, so that the signal can be well indicated in the time–
frequency spectrum of the S-transform. Finally, the automatic
first-break picking is accomplished in accordance with the
following procedures:
1. We utilize the S-transform to process the coefficients after
the scale multiplication and get the time–frequency matrix
S(τ, f ).
2. We use the following formula (9) to calculate the energy
at different times, and then we get the normalized energy via
formula (10).

E (τ ) = |S (τ, f )|2 , (9)
f
E − Emin
Enor m = , (10)
Emax − Emin
where E represents the energy at different time moments, Emax ,
Emin and Enorm are maximum energy, minimum energy and
normalized energy, respectively. Using normalized energy can
limit the energy value within the range of 0 to 1, which is
convenient for the following data processing.
3. The significant coefficients of the signal lead to a dramatic
increase in the normalized energy. In other words, the energy
has great variation when the signal arrives. Therefore, we
to obtain the energy difference between adjacent sampling
points, and find the local maxima. Since there may be a small
amount of noise interference, we use a small number to restrict
the local maxima. Through experiments, the number is chosen
as 0.05 in this paper. Finally, the previous sampling point of
the first local maximum point larger than 0.05 is regarded as
the first break.
Our method mainly aims at P-wave arrival time picking,
but it can easily be extended to detect P- and S-wave arrival
times. The P- and S-wave arrivals correspond to the previous
88 Y. Cheng, Y. Li and C. Zhang

Figure 1 Comparison of the proposed method and shearlet noise attenuation (select the sixth trace for detailed comparison). (a) Synthetic
microseismic record. (b) Time–frequency spectrum of the sixth trace before noise suppression. (c) Time–frequency spectrum of the sixth trace
after noise suppression. (d) Time–frequency spectrum of the shearlet coefficients in the sixth trace after the multiplication of adjacent fine scales
(third and fourth).

sampling point of the first and second local maxima that are
larger than 0.05, respectively.
The S-transform cannot get satisfactory first break picks
in high noise background, because there is no remarkable
time–frequency difference between the signal and noise. Com-
bining random noise attenuation with the S-transform is a
representative method of trying to improve the signal to noise
ratio (SNR) before picking. Next, we compare our method
versus a combination of noise attenuation using shearlets fol-
lowed by S-transform picking. We select a trace randomly
(6th) from the synthetic record shown in Fig. 1a for detailed
comparison (the true first break is 0.187 s). Figure 1b and c
shows the time–frequency spectra before and after noise sup-
pression, respectively. Figure 1d shows the time–frequency
spectrum of the shearlet coefficients after the multiplication
of adjacent fine scales. Through contrastive analysis, we can
see that most of the noise is effectively suppressed by shear-
let noise attenuation. However, the time–frequency values in
Fig. 1c change around 0.175 s, which seriously deviates from
the true first break time. The accuracy of S-transform picking
based on noise attenuation depends on good reconstruction
quality and denoising effect. However, the coefficients related
to the signals and noise are very close in high noise condition,
which makes it difficult to distinguish the signal from noise via
the threshold and leads to unsatisfactory denoising results. By
contrast, the proposed method can provide more accurate and


C 2018 European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers, Geophysical Prospecting, 67, 85–96
 First-break picking by Shearlet and Stockwell transforms 89

Figure 2 (a) Pure synthetic record. (b) Enlarged view of (a) (the red lines represent the vertical components for the geophones and the blue lines
represent the horizontal components).

Figure 3 Noisy synthetic records. (a) Noisy record added with white Gaussian noise. (b) Noisy record added with coherent noise.

reliable first break for noisy microseismic data. It is worth em-
phasizing that the shearlet transform is not used as a denoising
pre-processing in our method, we only consider the character-
istic difference between signal and noise in shearlet domain.
Based on the correlation of the signal coefficients at adjacent
scales, the weak signal shows significant property that differs
from noise. As a result, the signal is better gathered in time-
frequency spectrum of the S-transform. Our method shows
better performance than the picking method based on shear-
let noise attenuation. This is due to using a standard noise
attenuation method without the enhancements for process-
ing in the shearlet transform domain discussed in this paper.
However, these enhancements are essential to overcome the
large noise.
4 APPLICATIONS
4.1 Synthetic microseismic record
To illustrate the performance of the proposed method, we use
Ricker wavelet to establish a synthetic microseismic record
containing 24 traces, which is composed of three components
with the dominant frequency of 200 Hz (see Fig. 2). The sam-
pling rate is 1 ms, and the spatial sampling of the array of
24 receivers is 10 m. The vertical components for the geo-
phones are represented by the red lines, and the horizontal
components are represented by the blue lines. Figure 3a and b
shows noisy records added with white Gaussian noise (WGN)
and coherent noise for a signal to noise ratio (SNR) of –9 dB,
respectively.
We take the noisy record contaminated by WGN as an ex-
ample to illustrate the detailed implementation process of our
method. We use shearlet transform to decompose the record
for four scales and each scale is divided into six directions.
The third and the fourth scales are fine scales that contain
effective information. Figure 4a–f shows the coefficients in
different directions of the fourth scale from the first to the
sixth directions, respectively. The correlation energy between
the two adjacent fine scales is shown in Fig. 5. We can see
that the energy of the first two directions is larger than other
directions. It also shows that the valid signal is mainly mapped
to the first two directions, as demonstrated by Fig. 4a and b.


C 2018 European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers, Geophysical Prospecting, 67, 85–96
90 Y. Cheng, Y. Li and C. Zhang
Figure 4 (a–f) Shearlet coefficients of the fourth temporal frequency scale from the first to the sixth directions.
Figure 5 Correlation energy between adjacent fine scales (third and
fourth).
For the third and the fourth scales, we add the coefficients
of the signal directions together and regard the results as the
coefficients of the corresponding scale. Then, we do multi-
plication calculation on the coefficients of the same position
at adjacent fine scales and conduct the S-transform on the
obtained results.
We extract the sixth trace in Fig. 3a for the comparison.
Figure 6a shows the waveform of the sixth trace. Figure 6c
shows the shearlet coefficients of the sixth trace after the scale
multiplication. Figure 6b and d shows the corresponding time–
frequency spectrum of S-transform. Through the comparison,
we can observe that there are no significant time–frequency
differences between valid signal and noise in high noise back-
ground, many energy clusters caused by noise are produced in

C 2018 European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers, Geophysical Prospecting, 67, 85–96
the time–frequency spectrum, which increases the difficulty of
the signal recognition. However, the weak signal produces sig-
nificant signal coefficients in the proposed method. After the
processing of the coefficients by S-transform, the signal energy
is better gathered and the signal can be clearly identified from
the time–frequency spectrum. Our method eliminates the re-
dundant energy groups, so that we can pick more accurate first
arrival. We calculate the energy at different times and the nor-
malized energy is shown in Fig. 6e. Figure 6f shows the energy
difference between adjacent sampling points. The moment of
the previous sampling point of the first local maximum larger
than 0.05 is viewed as the first arrival time.
According to the above steps, we use the proposed
method and the S-transform method to process the noisy
records shown in Fig. 3a and b. The comparison results are
shown in Fig. 7a and b, where the automatic picks obtained by
our method and the S-transform method are marked by black
and green dots, respectively. For better observation, Fig. 7c
and d shows the enlarged view of Fig. 7a and b, respectively.
We can see that for the records with low noise, both the two
methods get satisfactory picking results. However, when sig-
nals are buried in strong noise, such as some horizontal com-
ponents, the first arrivals picked by the S-transform method
have a great deviation with the real first arrivals. By contrast,
the proposed method improves the picking accuracy visibly.
The quality of the automatic picks is reasonably good.
 First-break picking by Shearlet and Stockwell transforms 91

Figure 6 Comparison waveform and time–frequency spectrum of the sixth trace in Fig. 3a. (a) Waveform of the sixth trace. (b) Time–frequency
spectrum of the sixth trace. (c) Waveform of the sixth trace after the multiplication of the coefficients for the same position at adjacent fine scales
(third and fourth). (d) Time–frequency spectrum of the sixth trace after the scale multiplication. (e) Normalized energy. (f) Energy difference
between adjacent sampling points.

To further verify the reliability of the proposed method,
we simulate a Ricker wavelet that contains P-wave and
S-wave, as shown in Fig. 8a. The dominant frequency is 200
Hz and the sampling rate is 1 ms. We add WGN and real noise
to the pure wavelet, respectively, and generate noisy wavelets
with different SNRs. The SNR is defined as:

|s (t)|2
SNR = 10log10  t
, (11)
t |y (t) − s (t)|2
where y(t) is the noisy signal and s(t) is the original signal.
We conduct 1000 experiments in each group. Figure 8b and c
shows the waveform data examples added with different types
of noise (SNR = –8 dB).
Tables 1 and 2 show the statistical results of P- and S-
wave time arrivals in two groups of tests, respectively. In our
paper, when the absolute error between the auto-pick and the
true arrival is within 3 ms, the pick is considered as an ac-
curate pick. The two tables also list the statistics of the picks
whose absolute errors are zero (pick with no error) and not
more than 1 ms (pick within 1 ms). It can be seen that our
method can detect the P- and S-wave arrivals with high ac-
curacy. It provides reliable results for noisy data, most of the
picks are satisfactory, even at the SNR of –10 dB.


C 2018 European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers, Geophysical Prospecting, 67, 85–96
92 Y. Cheng, Y. Li and C. Zhang

Figure 7 First-break picking results for synthetic microseismic records. (a and b) Comparison of the proposed method (black dots) and the
S-transform method (green dots) for noisy records with white Gaussian noise and coherent noise, respectively. (c and d) Enlarged views of (a)
and (b).

Figure 8 (a) Pure Ricker wavelet. (b) Noisy wavelet added with white Gaussian noise. (c) Noisy wavelet added with real noise.

In order to show the superiority of the proposed method
more intuitively, we give the histogram comparison of our
method and the S-transform method at the SNR of –8 dB,
which is shown in Fig. 9. We can observe that the S-transform
method loses the ability for accurate picking when dealing
with the data containing strong noise, only a small part of
the auto-picks is acceptable. In comparison, our method re-
duces the picking errors significantly, the picking results of
the P- and S-wave arrivals under different noise conditions
are convincing. More than 95% of the arrival times are de-
tected within 2 ms, among which nearly 60% are consistent
with the real arrival times. From the data given in two tables
and the histograms of the absolute picking errors, it is clear
to see that the proposed method can provide accurate P-wave
and S-wave time arrivals in high noise conditions. When the
SNR is lower, the picking accuracy of P-wave is slightly worse
than that of S-wave. This is due to the weaker amplitude of
the P-wave, when the signal is disturbed by strong noise, the
result of the P-wave arrival is probable to be false or missed.
4.2 Field microseismic record
To further validate the effectiveness of our proposed method,
we process a field microseismic data set containing 15 traces as


C 2018 European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers, Geophysical Prospecting, 67, 85–96
 First-break picking by Shearlet and Stockwell transforms 93

Table 1 Statistical data of P-wave time arrivals in two groups of tests

The WGN Tests The Real Noise Tests

SNR Number Accurate Pick with Pick within Accurate Pick with Pick within
(dB) of Tests Pick No Error 1 ms Pick No Error 1 ms

0 1000 1000 882 960 1000 884 960

−5 1000 1000 725 903 995 721 906
−8 1000 987 587 741 976 578 728
−10 1000 960 432 627 948 421 607

Table 2 Statistical data of S-wave time arrivals in two groups of tests

The WGN Tests The Real Noise Tests

SNR Number Accurate Pick with Pick within Accurate Pick with Pick within
(dB) of Tests Pick No Error 1 ms Pick No Error 1 ms

0 1000 1000 894 969 1000 895 963

−5 1000 1000 720 910 998 706 903
−8 1000 990 596 742 985 583 731
−10 1000 982 540 659 966 535 642

Figure 9 Histograms of picking absolute error (s). The pick is considered as a valid pick when the absolute error is less than 3 ms. Note that a
large proportion of picks for the S-transform are outside this range of valid picks and the corresponding histogram classes are not shown on
the plots. (a and b) Statistics of P- and S-wave time arrivals in white Gaussian noise test, respectively. (c and d) Statistics of P- and S-wave time
arrivals in real noise test, respectively.

shown in Fig. 10a, where the vertical components are shown breaks is shown in Fig. 10b. We apply our method and the
in red and the horizontal components are shown in blue. The S-transform method to pick the arrival times. The picks are
sampling rate is 1 ms, and the spatial sampling of the array marked by black and green dots, respectively. Results show
of 15 receivers is 8 m. A magnified view around the first that most of the picks obtained by the S-transform method are


C 2018 European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers, Geophysical Prospecting, 67, 85–96
94 Y. Cheng, Y. Li and C. Zhang
Figure 10 First-break picking results for field microseismic record. (a) Field microseismic record. (b) Picking results of the proposed method
(black dots) and the S-transform method (green dots).
acceptable. However, for the third, fifth and the 14th traces,
whose valid signals are difficult to identify, the method gives
improper results. In contrast, the accuracy and consistency
of the arrival time picking are improved by our method; the
picking times are reasonable and satisfactory.
5 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we have presented a new first-break picking
method based on cascading use of shearlet and S-transforms.
The algorithm utilizes shearlet transform to capture spatial
coherency features of the signal. Based on the coefficient char-
acteristic and correlation differences between the signal and
noise in shearlet domain, the signal features are significantly
enhanced. Then, the signal energy is well gathered due to the
good time–frequency clustering of the S-transform.
The method has been evaluated using synthetic microseis-
mic records with various signal-to-noise ratios. Results show
that the method can be considered highly confident in noisy
environment. It has an accuracy over 95% even when the
signal to noise ratio (SNR) of data is as low as –8 dB. The
effectiveness of the method is further demonstrated through
the application to field microseismic data.
The methods have different properties under different
noise scenarios and objectives of the survey. Our method
stresses the capability of noise resistance. When the spacing
of the geophone is close, the signal shows strong correlation
and the coherent noise almost causes no interference. Our
method will provide better picking performance in this case.
The ability of signal processing methods, including ours, to
deal with interference of coherent noise diminishes as the spac-
ing of geophones increases and the noise becomes aliased. At
this time, the proposed method is still effective in produc-
ing more stable picks, which also reflects the superiority of

C 2018 European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers, Geophysical Prospecting, 67, 85–96
our method. The synthetic models in this paper only contain
P- and S-waves. The influence of other waveforms received
by the geophone in microseismic monitoring is neglected. In
future research, we will explore the picking performance of
the proposed method in dealing with complex microseismic
data, and try to find effective countermeasures to resolve its
deficiencies.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research is financially supported by the National Nat-
ural Science Foundations of China (under grants 41730422,
41574096 and 41704102).
REFERENCES
Akram J. and Eaton D.W. 2016. A review and appraisal of arrival-
time picking methods for downhole microseismic data. Geophysics
81, KS67–KS87.
Allen R. 1978. Automatic earthquake recognition and timing from
single traces. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 68,
1521–1532.
Boschetti F., Dentith M. and List R. 1996. A fractal-based algorithm
for detecting first arrivals on seismic traces. Geophysics 61, 1095–
1102.
Deflandre J.P. and Dubesset M. 1992. Identification of P/S wave suc-
cessions for application in microseismicity. Pure and Applied Geo-
physics 139, 405–420.
Earle P.S. and Shearer P.M. 1994. Characterization of global seismo-
grams using an automatic-picking algorithm. Bulletin of the Seis-
mological Society of America 84, 366–376.
Easley G., Labate D. and Lim W.Q. 2008. Sparse directional image
representations using the discrete shearlet transform. Applied and
Computational Harmonic Analysis 25, 25–46.
Guo K. and Labate D. 2009. Characterization and analysis of edges
using the continuous shearlet transform. SIAM Journal on Imaging
Sciences 2, 959–986.

Hosseini S.A., Javaherian A., Hassani H., Torabi S. and Sadri M.
2015. Adaptive attenuation of aliased ground roll using the shearlet
transform. Journal of Applied Geophysics 112, 190–205.
Kutyniok G. and Labate D. 2009. Resolution of the wavefront set
using continuous shearlets. Transactions of the American Mathe-
matical Society 361, 2719–2754.
Leonard M. 2000. Comparison of manual and automatic onset time
picking. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 90, 1384–
1390.
Lim W.Q. 2010. The discrete shearlet transform: a new directional
transform and compactly supported shearlet frames. IEEE Trans-
actions on Image Processing 19, 1166–1180.
Maxwell S. C., Rutledge J., Jones R. and Fehler M. 2010. Petroleum
reservoir characterization using downhole microseismic monitor-
First-break picking by Shearlet and Stockwell transforms 95
of real number, positive real number and two-dimensional real
number, respectively. Mas is a matrix that can be factorized as
Mas = Bs Aa = (1 s )(a √0 ), where Aa is the anisotropic dilation
01 0 a
matrix and Bs is the shear matrix. The expression shows that
the collection of basis functions ψa,s,μ are generated by ap-
plying dilations, shear transformations and translations to a
well-localized window function ψ(x).
The generating function ψ should satisfy appropriate ad-
missibility conditions (Kutyniok and Labate 2009). For the
point ξ = (ξ1 , ξ2 ) ∈ R̂2 , ξ1 = 0, R̂ represents frequency do-
main; let ψ be given by
ing. Geophysics 75, 75A129–75A137. 

ψ̂ (ξ ) = ψ̂ (ξ1 , ξ2 ) = ψ̂1 (ξ1 ) ψ̂2 ξ2 ξ1 , (A2)

Merouane A., Yilmaz O. and Baysal E. 2015. Random noise attenu-
ation using 2-dimensional shearlet transform. SEG Technical Pro- where ψ̂ denotes the Fourier transform of ψ, ψ̂1 ∈ C ∞ (R);
gram Expanded Abstracts, P4770–4774. it is an infinitely differentiable function on real number
Pinnegar C.R. and Mansinha L. 2003. The S-transform with windows
domain with the support sup pψ̂1 ⊂ [−2, −1/2] ∪ [1/2, 2],
of arbitrary and varying shape. Geophysics 68(1), 381–385.
Saragiotis C.D., Hadjileontiadis L.J. and Panas S.M. 2002. PAI-S/K: ψ̂2 ∈ C ∞ (R), sup pψ̂2 ∈ [−1, 1], with ψ̂2 > 0,
ψ2
= 1 on
a robust automatic seismic P phase arrival identification scheme. (–1,1). The construction of functions ψ1 and ψ2 is mentioned
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing 40(6), in the reference (Easley, Labate and Lim 2008).
1395–1404. If ψ ∈ L2 (R2 ) satisfies the above assumptions, the two-
Stockwell R.G., Mansinha L. and Lowe R.P. 1996. Localization of the
dimensional shearlet transform is defined as follows:
complex spectrum: the S transform. IEEE Transactions on Signal
Processing 44, 998–1001. SHψ ( f ) =  f, ψa,s,μ , (A3)
Xu Y.S., Weaver J.B., Healy D.M. and Lu J. 1994. Wavelet transform
domain filters: a spatially selective noise filtration technique. IEEE where SHψ (•) is the shearlet transform and • defines the
Transactions on Image Processing 3, 747–758. inner product. The function f ∈ L2 (R2 ) can be recovered by
Zhang C., Li Y., Lin H.B., Yang B.J. and Wu N. 2015. Adaptive
threshold based shearlet transform noise attenuation method for   
surface microseismic data. 77th EAGE Conference and Exhibition da
f =  f, ψa,s,μ ψa,s,μ dsdμ. (A4)
2015, Madrid, Spain. R2 R R+ a3
Zhang H., Thurber C. and Rowe C. 2003. Automatic p-wave ar- The characteristics of shearlets are reflected more obvi-
rival detection and picking with multiscale wavelet analysis for
ously in frequency domain:
single component recordings. Bulletin of the Seismological Society
of America 93, 1904–1912.

ψ̂a,s,μ (ξ1 , ξ2 ) = a 3/4 e−2πiξ μ ψ̂1 (aξ1 ) ψ̂2 a 1/2 (ξ2 /ξ1 − s) , (A5)
Zhao X., Li Y., Zhuang G.H., Zhang C. and Han X. 2016.
2-D TFPF based on contourlet transform for seismic random noise
attenuation. Journal of Applied Geophysics 129, 158–166.

APPENDIX

SHEARLET TRANSFORM

In this section, we briefly introduce the basic principles of the

shearlet transform. The shearlets are expressed as
  − 1

ψa,s,μ (x) = det Mas  2 ψ M−1 +
as (x − μ) : a ∈ R , s ∈ R, μ ∈ R
2
,

(A1)

where x is a variable, x ∈ R2 is the analysing element, ψa,s,μ (x)

are called shearlets and parameter a , s and μ indicate the scale, Figure A1 Frequency support of shearlets for different a and s (a is
shear and translation, respectively. R, R+ and R2 are domains the scale parameter and s is the shear parameter).


C 2018 European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers, Geophysical Prospecting, 67, 85–96
96 Y. Cheng, Y. Li and C. Zhang

where ψ̂a,s,μ is the Fourier transform of ψa,s,μ . The frequency we can see that each element ψ̂a,s,μ is supported on origin-
support of each function ψ̂a,s,μ can be written as symmetric trapezoids, the orientation is along a straight line

        with the slope equals to S. The support becomes increasingly
sup pψ̂a,s,μ ⊂ ξ1 , ξ2 : ξ1 ∈ −2 a, −1 2a ∪ 1 2a, 2 a ,
   √  elongated as a tends to zero. Shearlets show excellent local-
ξ ξ − s  ≤ a . (A6)
2 1
ization and compact support characteristics, which makes the
Figure A1 gives the frequency support of shearlets for dif- shearlet transform more effective in capturing the geometric
ferent values of a and s (Guo and Labate 2009), from which structure of multidimensional data.


C 2018 European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers, Geophysical Prospecting, 67, 85–96