Arrival-time detection with histogram distance for acoustic emission signals

Arrival-time picking is a fundamental step in time-of-arrival ( TOA)-based localisation in current and future acoustic emission (AE), microseismic and seismic localisation systems. The accurate detection of TOA is of great importance for high localisation accuracy. This work presents a histogram distance-based method for TOA detection of elastic wave signals. The authors treat an original elastic waveform that includes the arrival as two different locally stationary segments, namely the intervals following and preceding arrival. To determine the optimal separation of these two stationary segments, ie the arrival time, histograms of these intervals are calculated and a measure of the distance between them modified from the Bhattacharyya coefficient is proposed. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using TOA picking for AE. The method is shown to provide accurate and robust picks on AE signals under various signal-to-noise ratios. To evaluate the adaptability of the method to other TOA picking scenarios, it is applied to detect the seismic P-phase. The detection accuracy is adequate and errors are constrained to within a few seconds. Factors that influence the detection accuracy are discussed. The results suggest that the proposed method has the potential to detect TOA in various fields.