A B S T R A C TSpectral decomposition, or local time-frequency analysis, tries to enhance the amount of information one can obtain from a seismic volume by finding the frequency content of the seismic data at each time sample. However, if a small amount of noise is present within the seismic amplitude volume, it has the potential to become more prominent in the spectrally decomposed data especially if high-resolution or sparsity promoting methods are utilized. To combat this problem post-processing noise removal has commonly been employed, but these techniques can potentially degrade the resolution of small-scale geological structures in their attempt to remove this noise. Rather than de-noising the spectrally decomposed data after they are generated, we propose to incorporate the ideas of f −x−y deconvolution within the spectral decomposition process to create an algorithm that has the ability to de-noise the timefrequency representation of the data as they are being generated. By incorporating the spatial prediction error filters that are utilized for f −x−y deconvolution with the spectral decomposition problem, a spatially smooth time-frequency representation that maintains its sparsity, or high-resolution characteristics, can be obtained. This spatially smooth high-resolution time-frequency representation is less likely to exhibit the random noise that was present in the more conventionally obtained timefrequency representation. Tests on a real data set demonstrate that by de-noising while the time-frequency representation is being constructed, small-scale geological structures are more likely to maintain their resolution since the de-noised time-frequency representation is specifically built to reconstruct the data.