Automatic discrimination of earthquakes and quarry blasts using wavelet filter bank and support vector machine

Abstract

False discrimination between earthquakes and quarry blasts may lead to an unrealistic characterization of the natural seismicity of a region. The similarity in seismograms between earthquakes and quarry blasts is the primary reason for incorrect discrimination. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a discriminative algorithm utilizing wavelet filter bank to extract unique features between earthquakes and quarry blasts. The discriminative features are found to be in the first five seconds after the onset time. The proposed algorithm is divided into two stages: first, wavelet filter bank extracts the features of the seismic signals; then, support vector machine classifies the event based on these extracted features. The proposed algorithm achieves a discrimination accuracy of 98.5% when applied to 900 earthquakes and quarry blast waveforms.