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Automatic arrival time detection for earthquakes based on Modified Laplacian of Gaussian filter

Computers & Geosciences • 2018
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Publication Information
Authors Omar M. Saada; Ahmed Shalaby; Lotfy Samy; Mohammed S. Sayed
Keywords Arrival time of earthquake (P-wave); Laplacian of Gaussian filter (LoG); Akaike Information Criterion (AIC); Automatic time picks; Short and long time average (STA/LTA) algorithm
Journal Computers & Geosciences
Publisher Elsevier
Volume Volume 113
Issue April 2018
Pages 43–53
publication.type International
Paper Link Open Link
Supplementary Materials Not Available
Abstract
Precise identification of onset time for an earthquake is imperative in the right figuring of earthquake's location and different parameters that are utilized for building seismic catalogues. P-wave arrival detection of weak events or micro-earthquakes cannot be precisely determined due to background noise. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on Modified Laplacian of Gaussian (MLoG) filter to detect the onset time even in the presence of very weak signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The proposed algorithm utilizes a denoising-filter algorithm to smooth the background noise. In the proposed algorithm, we employ the MLoG mask to filter the seismic data. Afterward, we apply a Dual-threshold comparator to detect the onset time of the event. The results show that the proposed algorithm can detect the onset time for micro-earthquakes accurately, with SNR of −12 dB. The proposed algorithm achieves an onset time picking accuracy of 93% with a standard deviation error of 0.10 s for 407 field seismic waveforms. Also, we compare the results with short and long time average algorithm (STA/LTA) and the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), and the proposed algorithm outperforms them.