EPick: Multi-Class Attention-based U-shaped Neural Network for Earthquake Detection and Seismic Phase Picking

Abstract

Earthquake detection and seismic phase picking not only play a crucial role in travel time estimation of body waves(P and S waves) but also in the localisation of the epicenter of the corresponding event. Generally, manual phase picking is a trustworthy and the optimum method to determine the phase arrival time, however, its capacity is restricted by available resources and time. Moreover, noisy seismic data renders an additional critical challenge for fast and accurate phase picking. In this study, a deep learning based model, EPick, is proposed which benefits both from U shaped neural network (also called UNet)and attention mechanism, as a strong alternative for seismic event detection and phase picking. On one hand, the utilization of UNet structure enables addressing different levels of deep features. On the other hand, attention mechanism promotes the decoder in the UNet structure to focus on the efficient exploitation of the low-resolution features learned from the encoder part to achieve precise phase picking. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that EPick achieves better performance over the benchmark method, and show the models robustness when tested on a different seismic dataset.