A new thresholding type technique for the detection of seismic events

The problem of seismic events detection constitutes one of the most important and vital tasks for the automatic identification of the seismic phase arrivals. In this work, we propose a new thresholding type technique, tailored to fit real world situations where our knowledge on the statistical characteristics of the background noise process are unknown and a strict hypothesis testing framework can not be followed. In such cases the replacement of the unknown probability density function under the null hypothesis by its empirical counterpart, constitutes a possibility. In this work, a two stage procedure is proposed. The first one concerns the estimation of the empirical functions of the noise process itself as well as its whitened counterpart. In the second stage, using the above empirical functions, a thresholding scheme is proposed in order to solve the problem of the detection of seismic events in a non strict hypothesis testing framework. The performance of the proposed technique is confirmed by its application in a series of experiments both in synthetic and real seismic data sets.