Convolutional neural networks for microseismic waveform classification and arrival picking

Microseismic data have a low signal-to-noise ratio (S/N). Existing waveform classification and arrival-picking methods are not effective enough for noisy microseismic data with low S/N. We have adopted a novel antinoise classifier for waveform classification and arrival picking by combining the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and the convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed CWT-CNN classifier is applied to synthetic and field microseismic data sets. Results show that CWT-CNN classifier has much better performance than the basic deep feedforward neural network (DNN), especially for microseismic data with low S/N. The CWT-CNN classifier has a shallow network architecture and small learning data set, and it can be trained quickly for different data sets. We have determined why CWT-CNN has better performance for noisy microseismic data. CWT can decompose the microseismic data into time-frequency spectra, where effective signals and interfering noise are easier to distinguish. With the help of CWT, CNN can focus on the specific frequency components to extract useful features and build a more effective classifier.