Earthquake Event Recognition on Smartphones Based on Neural Network Models

Using sensors embedded in smartphones to study earthquake early warning (EEW) technology can effectively reduce the high construction and maintenance costs of traditional EEW systems. However, due to the impact of human activities, it is very difficult to accurately detect seismic events recorded on mobile phones. In this paper, to improve the detection accuracy of earthquakes on mobile phones, we investigated the suitability of different types of neural network models in seismic event detection. Firstly, we collected three-component acceleration records corresponding to human activities in various scenarios such as walking, running, and cycling through our self-developed mobile application. Combined with traditional strong-motion seismic event records fusing typical mobile phone accelerometer self-noise, all records were used for establishing the training and testing dataset. Finally, two types of neural network models, fully connected and convolutional neural networks, were trained, validated, and tested. The results showed that the accuracy rates of the neural network models were all over 98%, and the precision rate for seismic events and the recall rate for non-earthquake events could both reach 99%, indicating that the introduction of neural networks into the earthquake recognition on smartphones can significantly enhance the accuracy of seismic event recognition. Therefore, we can exceedingly reduce the amount of data transmitted to the processing server, further lowering the load on the server processor and effectively increasing the lead time at each target site for an EEW system.