Detecting earthquakes: a novel deep learning-based approach for effective disaster response

In the present study, we present an intelligent earthquake signal detector that provides added assistance to automate traditional disaster responses. To effectively respond in a crisis scenario, additional sensors and automation are always necessary. Deep learning has achieved success in various low signal-to-noise ratio tasks, which motivated us to propose a novel 3-dimensional (3D) CNN-RNN-based earthquake detector from a demonstration paradigm to real-time implementation. Data taken from the STanford EArthquake Dataset (STEAD) are used to train the network. After preprocessing the raw earthquake signals, features such as log-mel spectrograms are extracted. Once the model has learned spatial and temporal information from low-frequency earthquake waves, it can be employed in real time to distinguish small and large earthquakes from seismic noise with an accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 99.057%, 98.488%, and 99.621%, respectively. We also observe that the choice of filters in log-mel spectrogram impacts the results much more than the model complexity. Furthermore, we implement and test the model on data collected continuously over two months by a personal seismometer in the laboratory. The inference speed for a single prediction is 2.27 seconds, and the system delivers a stable detection of all 63 major earthquakes from November 2019 to December 2019 reported by the Japan Meteorological Agency.