Publications

The adoption of machine learning techniques in the seismology community has led to great performance improvements in several areas, including signal processing. Specifically, the development of deep learning–based seismic waveform denoising models has the potential to yield improvements in signal detection capabilities for networks operating in particularly noisy environments. Recent advancements in the design of these deep learning denoising models have included the incorporation of continuous and discrete wavelet transform functions into the network architecture to improve the learning capabilities and efficiency of said models. These wavelet transform–based seismic denoising models have shown improved denoising capabilities in regions where there is good agreement between the data features present in the training and evaluation datasets. However, questions remain about the overall transportability of these models to other monitoring regions. Here, in this study, we will determine the baseline transportability of a newly developed multilevel wavelet‐transform convolutional neural network (MWCNN) seismic denoising model. We accomplish this by taking a version of the MWCNN denoising model trained on data collected from the Utah region and evaluating its denoising performance on datasets collected from the neighboring Nevada region, which differ with regard to monitoring sensor types and event histories. We find that there is a notable variability in denoising performance related to the degree of similarity between the initial and new target datasets. The most notable difference in denoising performance is the ability of the denoising model to preserve accurate amplitude information associated with the signal energy present in the waveform data. Finally, we evaluate the ability of transfer learning techniques to improve the transportability of the MWCNN denoising model. We find that although there is still a performance gap present in the denoising results of the MWCNN model, transfer learning did yield improved results.

Seismic waveform data recorded at stations can be thought of as a superposition of the signal from a source of interest and noise from other sources. Frequency-based filtering methods for waveform denoising do not result in desired outcomes when the targeted signal and noise occupy similar frequency bands. Recently, denoising techniques based on deep-learning convolutional neural networks (CNNs), in which a recorded waveform is decomposed into signal and noise components, have led to improved results. These CNN methods, which use short-time Fourier transform representations of the time series, provide signal and noise masks for the input waveform. These masks are used to create denoised signal and designaled noise waveforms, respectively. However, advancements in the field of image denoising have shown the benefits of incorporating discrete wavelet transforms (DWTs) into CNN architectures to create multilevel wavelet CNN (MWCNN) models. The MWCNN model preserves the details of the input due to the good time–frequency localization of the DWT. Here, we use a data set of over 382,000 constructed seismograms recorded by the University of Utah Seismograph Stations network to compare the performance of CNN and MWCNN-based denoising models. Evaluation of both models on constructed test data shows that the MWCNN model outperforms the CNN model in the ability to recover the ground-truth signal component in terms of both waveform similarity and preservation of amplitude information. Model evaluation of real-world data shows that both the CNN and MWCNN models outperform standard band-pass filtering (BPF; average improvement in signal-to-noise ratio of 9.6 and 19.7 dB, respectively, with respect to BPF). Evaluation of continuous data suggests the MWCNN denoiser can improve both signal detection capabilities and phase arrival time estimates.

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