CRPN: A cascaded classification and regression DNN framework for seismic phase picking

Current deep neural networks (DNN) used for seismic phase picking are becoming more complex, which consumes much computing time without significant accuracy improvement. In this study, we introduce a cascaded classification and regression framework for seismic phase picking, named as the classification and regression phase net (CRPN), which contains two convolutional neural network (CNN) models with different complexity to meet the requirements of accuracy and efficiency. The first stage of the CRPN are shallow CNNs used for rapid detection of seismic phase and picking P and S arrival times for earthquakes with magnitude larger than 2.0, respectively. The second stage of CRPN is used for high precision classification and regression. The regression is designed to reduce the time difference between the probability maximum and the real arrival time. After being trained using 500,000 P and S phases, the CRPN can process 400 hours’ seismic data per second, whose sampling rate is 1 Hz and 25 Hz for the two stages, respectively, on a Nvidia K2200 GPU, and pick 93% P and 89% S phases with the error being reduced by 0.1s after regression correction.