Abstract: The seismic signals collected underground in coal mines often exhibit complex waveforms accompanied by significant noise interference, leading to a reduction in the accuracy of first arrival time picking of seismic signals and thereby impacting the inversion and interpretation of seismic data. In response to the low signal-to-noise ratio seismic signals collected in complex interference environments, a method for seismic noise suppression and first arrival extraction based on the Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) and the Genetic Algorithm-optimized Support Vector Machine (GA-SVM) is proposed to enhance the quality of seismic signals under complex noise conditions in coal mines. The approach employs the Variational Mode Decomposition for adaptive decomposition of the noisy seismic signals, yielding several Variational Mode Components (IMF). The feature extraction is applied to the IMFs obtained from VMD decomposition, utilizing the extracted signal features as the basis for discerning signal validity. Genetic Algorithm is utilized to optimize the Support Vector Machine model, obtaining the optimal penalty factor (c) and kernel function parameter (g). The optimized SVM model is then employed for the validity discrimination of the IMF components, reconstructing them into high signal-to-noise ratio signals. By applying the noise suppression algorithm to artificially noised seismic signals, the common types of noise encountered in coal mines are effectively suppressed, validating the feasibility of the algorithm. Noise suppression processing is applied to the seismic records obtained from mine roadways, successfully mitigating interference noise in the data and significantly improving the signal-to-noise ratio of the seismic records, thereby enhancing the accuracy of first arrival time picking. The results indicate that the seismic noise suppression and first arrival extraction method based on the VMD and GA-SVM can effectively separate and extract valid signals from noisy seismic records, improving first arrival time picking accuracy. This approach demonstrates a significant potential for its application in complex interference conditions in mines, which is of significance for the seismic exploration in the mining environments with complex interference conditions.