S waves travel slower than P waves and have a lower dominant frequency. Therefore, applying common techniques such as time-frequency filtering and f-k filtering to separate S waves from ground roll is difficult because ground roll is also characterized by slow velocity and low frequency. In this study, we present a method for attenuating ground roll using a polarization filtering method based on the t-f-k transform. We describe the particle motion of the waves by complex vector signals. Each pair of frequency components, whose frequencies have the same absolute value but different signs, of the complex signal indicate an elliptical or linear motion. The polarization parameters of the elliptical or linear motion are explicitly related to the two Fourier coefficients. We then extend these concepts to the t-f-k domain and propose a polarization filtering method for ground roll attenuation based on the t-f-k transform. The proposed approach can define automatically the time-varying reject zones on the f-k panel at different times as a function of the reciprocal ellipticity. Four attributes, time, frequency, apparent velocity and polarization are used to identify and extract the ground roll simultaneously. Thus, the ground roll and body waves can be separated as long as they are dissimilar in one of these attributes. We compare our method with commonly used filtering techniques by applying the methods to synthetic and real seismic data. The results indicate that our method can attenuate ground roll while preserving body waves more effectively than the other methods.