Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Pre-Trained Vision Foundation Models for Active and Passive Seismic Data Denoising
For geophysicists and exploration seismologists, this work provides a practical method to leverage pre-trained vision models for seismic denoising without requiring large domain-specific datasets or retraining from scratch.
The paper proposes a parameter-efficient framework that adapts general-purpose Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for seismic data denoising using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and a kurtosis-guided unsupervised test-time adaptation module. Experiments show the framework matches or outperforms domain-specific models on public and cross-site seismic data, demonstrating strong generalization.
The demand for high-resolution subsurface imaging and continuous Earth monitoring has driven rapid growth in active and passive seismic data from dense geophone deployments, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) arrays, and large-scale 2D and 3D surveys. This expansion makes complex noise suppression increasingly challenging, especially when signal fidelity must be preserved. Conventional supervised deep learning methods are often task-specific, require large paired datasets, and can suffer from domain shift under new acquisition conditions. Foundation models offer a promising alternative, but pre-training seismic foundation models from scratch requires massive domain-specific data and substantial computation. We propose an efficient framework that repurposes general-purpose Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for geophysical tasks through Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning. The architecture uses a pre-trained VFM, a DINOv3 encoder, adapted with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to enable effective feature adaptation with few additional parameters. To improve robustness under unseen field conditions without ground truth, we introduce a kurtosis-guided unsupervised test-time adaptation module that updates only LoRA parameters during inference. This module self-calibrates the model to site-specific noise by identifying information-rich regions via kurtosis and performing self-training without labeled data. Experiments on public exploration seismic images and DAS vertical seismic profiling data from the Utah FORGE site show that the framework matches or outperforms domain-specific models. Tests on unseen cross-site data from a land survey in China and the Groß Schönebeck geothermal site in Germany further demonstrate strong generalization and effective signal-noise separation. These results highlight the potential of adapting pre-trained VFMs to data-intensive problems in exploration seismology.