Control Systems and Optimization Letters
Vol 4, No 2 (2026)

Deep Learning Architectures for Seismic Upgoing–Downgoing Wavefield Separation: A Comparative Benchmark and Cross-Dataset Generalization Study

Monirul Islam (Hubei University of Automotive Technology)
Zhong Yu (Hubei University of Automotive Technology)
Shahin Alam (Hubei University of Automotive Technology)



Article Info

Publish Date
27 Aug 2026

Abstract

Separating upgoing (reflection) energy from downgoing (source-side and multiple) energy is a critical preprocessing step in reflection and vertical seismic profile (VSP) seismology, yet classical frequency–wavenumber, median, and Radon-based filters degrade sharply under lateral velocity variation, topography, and spatial aliasing. This paper reports a systematic, same-dataset comparison of seven wavefield-separation algorithms: a simple convolutional network (CNN), U-Net, bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM), Transformer, ResNet, an MLP with PCA dimensionality reduction, and the classical f–k filter trained and evaluated on 201 synthetic acoustic shot gathers and stress-tested on an independent 240-gather cross-dataset. BiLSTM achieved the best in-distribution performance (correlation = 0.9822, SNR = 14.52 dB) and the smallest relative degradation (41.2%) under domain shift, while U-Net was the strongest convolutional architecture (correlation = 0.7600) and the classical f–k filter performed worst (correlation = 0.3003, SNR = −0.37 dB). All models lost substantial accuracy on the cross-dataset, confirming that domain shift not architectural capacity is the principal barrier to field deployment. The study contributes a reproducible, consistently evaluated benchmark; a rigorous cross-dataset generalization test rarely reported in the literature; and quantitative evidence that recurrent and attention-based sequence models outperform convolutional counterparts for 1-D trace-wise wavefield separation. The findings motivate transfer learning, physics-informed regularization, and larger, more diverse training sets as the next steps toward field-ready deployment.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

csol

Publisher

Subject

Aerospace Engineering Automotive Engineering Computer Science & IT Control & Systems Engineering Electrical & Electronics Engineering Engineering

Description

Control Systems and Optimization Letters is an open-access journal offering authors the opportunity to publish in all fundamental and interdisciplinary areas of control and optimization, rapidly enabling a safe and sustainable interconnected human society. Control Systems and Optimization Letters ...