  The localized nature of curvelet functions, together with their frequency and
dip characteristics, makes the curvelet transform an excellent choice for
processing seismic data. In this work, a denoising method is proposed based on
a combination of the curvelet transform and a whitening filter along with
procedure for noise variance estimation. The whitening filter is added to get
the best performance of the curvelet transform under coherent and incoherent
correlated noise cases, and furthermore, it simplifies the noise estimation
method and makes it easy to use the standard threshold methodology without
digging into the curvelet domain. The proposed method is tested on
pseudo-synthetic data by adding noise to real noise-less data set of the
Netherlands offshore F3 block and on the field data set from east Texas, USA,
containing ground roll noise. Our experimental results show that the proposed
algorithm can achieve the best results under all types of noises (incoherent or
uncorrelated or random, and coherent noise).
