A ratio test for the accurate automatic P — wave onset detection

In this paper a new nonlinear transformation of the raw data based on the notion of the length of seismogram and a ratio test statistic for the accurate automatic P - wave onset detection problem are proposed. The basic characteristic of the proposed statistic is that it makes no assumptions for the properties of the noise, apart from very loose stationarity requirements. Based on this statistic, we propose an algorithm for the accurate estimation of the arrival times. From a series of experiments on real signals we have conducted, the proposed picking method seems to outperform well known in the literature methods.