Summary Microseismic data with complex noise, weak energy and low S/N ratio. The effective signal is usually overwhelmed by random noise. In this paper, we propose an empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and independent component analysis (ICA) method for noise attenuation. Through the EMD-ICA method, the signal is first decomposed into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) by EMD. By processing IMFs, a noise component can be reconstructed. Then with the noise component and the original signal, combine the advantage of the ICA algorithm that can extract source signals independently. The effective signal can be separated from the noisy records automatically. Finally, achieve the purpose of detecting microseismic signals.