A Framework for Real-Time Volcano-Seismic Event Recognition Based on Multi-Station Seismograms and Semantic Segmentation Models

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel, real-time seismic event recognition framework using semantic segmentation models on multi-station volcano data, improving detection accuracy and robustness across different volcano conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a new end-to-end approach transforming multi-channel seismic signals into images for simultaneous detection and classification using segmentation models.

Findings

UNet achieved up to 0.91 F1 score

Model demonstrated high robustness to noise

Effective across multiple volcano datasets

Abstract

In volcano monitoring, effective recognition of seismic events is essential for understanding volcanic activity and raising timely warning alerts. Traditional methods rely on manual analysis, which can be subjective and labor-intensive. Furthermore, current automatic approaches often tackle detection and classification separately, mostly rely on single station information and generally require tailored preprocessing and representations to perform predictions. These limitations often hinder their application to real-time monitoring and utilization across different volcano conditions. This study introduces a novel approach that utilizes Semantic Segmentation models to automate seismic event recognition by applying a straight forward transformation of multi-channel 1D signals into 2D representations, enabling their use as images. Our framework employs a data-driven, end-to-end design that integrates multi-station seismic data with minimal preprocessing, performing both detection and classification simultaneously for five seismic event classes. We evaluated four state-of-the-art segmentation models (UNet, UNet++, DeepLabV3+ and SwinUNet) on approximately 25.000 seismic events recorded at four different Chilean volcanoes: Nevados del Chill\'an Volcanic Complex, Laguna del Maule, Villarrica and Puyehue-Cord\'on Caulle. Among these models, the UNet architecture was identified as the most effective model, achieving mean F1 and Intersection over Union (IoU) scores of up to 0.91 and 0.88, respectively, and demonstrating superior noise robustness and model flexibility to unseen volcano datasets.