Xiaoyu Zhu, Jeffrey Shragge

Real-time microseismic monitoring is essential for understanding fractures associated with underground fluid injection in unconventional reservoirs. However, microseismic events recorded on monitoring arrays are usually contaminated with strong noise. With a low signal-to-noise ratio (S/R), the detection of microseismic events is challenging using conventional detection methods such as the short-term average/long-term average (STA/LTA) technique. Common machine learning methods, e.g., feature extraction plus support vector machine (SVM) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), can achieve higher accuracy with strong noise, but they are usually time-consuming and memory-intensive to run. We propose the use of YOLOv3, a state-of-art real-time object detection system in microseismic event detection. YOLOv3 is a one-stage deep CNN detector that predicts class confidence and bounding boxes for images at high speed and with great precision. With pre-trained weights from the ImageNet 1000-class competition dataset, physics-based training of the YOLOv3 algorithm is performed on a group of forward modeled synthetic microseismic data with varying S/R. We also add randomized forward-modeled surface seismic events and Gaussian white noise to generate ``semi-realistic'' training and testing datasets. YOLOv3 is able to detect weaker microseismic event signals with low signal-to-noise ratios (e.g., S/N=0.1) and achieves a mean average precision of 88.71\% in near real time. Further work is required to test YOLOv3 in field production settings.