Test-Time Augmentations and Quality Controls for Improving Regional Seismic Phase Picking

Regional seismic phases are essential for imaging Earth's internal structure. Although extensive regional seismic networks are publicly available worldwide, only a small fraction of recorded phase arrivals are picked for constraining earthquake source parameters, leaving most data untapped. Recent deep-learning methods offer powerful tools for automatic phase picking, yet their performance often lags behind that of human experts, particularly at relatively large epicentral distances such as the case of the Pn phase (~200-2000 km). Here, we systematically assess the effect of different test-time augmentation strategies on the Pn phase picking performance using PickNet and PhaseNet, along with the Seis-PnSn dataset containing data worldwide to simulate the out-of-distribution situation. We also propose quality control measures to obtain reliable results when ground truths are unknown. Our experiments show that filter-bank augmentation is more effective than the shift augmentation and the rotation augmentation, improving the proportion of picks within ±0.5/1.0 s errors to 53.87%/70.82% compared with the baseline of 48.98%/66.94% for PickNet and ±0.5/1.0 s errors to 48.45%/67.06% compared with the baseline of 46.32%/64.28% for PhaseNet. After the quality control using the standard deviation of different augmentation results, the proportion is further boosted to 67.39%/78.53% for PickNet and 57.99%/74.72% for PhaseNet. Additionally, we provide the workflow in our study as scripts for real-world data processing. Our work enhances both the accuracy and accessibility of regional seismic phase picking, thereby contributing to the studies of Earth's internal structure and earthquake source characterization.