Due to high spatial resolution, low cost, and wide bandwidth, distributed optical fiber acoustic sensing (DAS) is regarded as a potential tool for data acquisition in vertical seismic profile (VSP) surveys. However, in real DAS-VSP records, desired signals are often seriously plagued by various noise, which does not appear in the conventional seismic data received by electronic geophones. Exploring a high-performing attenuation method for the background noise can significantly improve the quality of DAS-VSP records and has essential impacts on the following imaging and interpretation. Deep-learning-based methods, especially convolutional neural network (CNN), have shown remarkable performance in seismic data denoising. However, the conventional CNN-based methods may degrade when dealing with DAS-VSP records in low signal-to-noise ratio. In this study, we propose a novel multi-scale dense-connection denoising network (MDD-Net) to achieve high-accuracy processing of the complex DAS background noise. Unlike conventional multi-scale networks, MDD-Net utilizes widen convolution block to capture the multi-scale features of the analyzed data. On this basis, dense connection operations are employed to fuse the features and improve the network efficiency. Meanwhile, an enhanced spatial attention (ESA) block is designed to reinforce the features, which are helpful for noise suppression and weak signal recovery. Both synthetic and field DAS-VSP records are processed to verify the effectiveness of MDD-Net. Meanwhile, we also compare the denoising results with other competing methods. The experimental results demonstrate that MDD-Net can significantly attenuate the complex DAS background noise and restore the desired signals, even for the weak upgoing signals.

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) is regarded as a novel acquisition technology for seismic data. Compared with conventional electrical geophones, DAS has a series of obvious advantages including low-cost, high spatial resolution, good coverage, and strong resistance to the harsh environment. Noise attenuation is an essential step in seismic data processing. However, there are two main difficulties faced by the denoising task of DAS seismic data. On the one hand, some background noise in DAS seismic data, such as optical low-frequency noise, horizontal noise, and fading noise, is unique and not presented in the conventional seismic data; on the other hand, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of DAS seismic data is relatively low. Recently, a convolutional neural network (CNN) has shown superior denoising performance compared to the traditional method. To follow this promising trend, we propose a multi-scale interactive convolutional neural network (MSI-Net) and apply it to denoise the challenging DAS seismic data. Different from most of the existing CNN architecture used in seismic data denoising, the MSI-Net considers both coarse-scale and fine-scale features by improving the inherent serial convolution to multi-scale parallel convolution, which is beneficial to recover detailed information. Moreover, we utilize some connections to achieve the information interaction between different scales, which promotes the flow of information and enables the network to extract more informative multi-scale features from the DAS seismic data. Moreover, both synthetic and real examples demonstrate that the proposed MSI-Net can effectively attenuate a variety of unique DAS background noise and also completely recover the weak signals. Compared with conventional CNN architecture, MSI-Net exhibits better performance in global SNR and local details.