Parallel System Architecture (PSA): An efficient approach for automatic recognition of volcano-seismic events

Automatic recognition of volcano-seismic events is becoming one of the most demanded features in the early warning area at continuous monitoring facilities. While human-driven cataloguing is time-consuming and often an unreliable task, an appropriate machine framework allows expert technicians to focus only on result analysis and decision-making. This work presents an alternative to serial architectures used in classic recognition systems introducing a parallel implementation of the whole process: configuration, feature extraction, feature selection and classification stages are independently carried out for each type of events in order to exploit the intrinsic properties of each signal class. The system uses Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) to classify the database recorded at Deception Volcano Island (Antarctica) obtaining a baseline recognition rate of 84% with a cepstral-based waveform parameterization in the serial architecture. The parallel approach increases the results to close to 92% using mixture-based parameterization vectors or up to 91% when the vector size is reduced by 19% via the Discriminative Feature Selection (DFS) algorithm. Besides the result improvement, the parallel architecture represents a major step in terms of flexibility and reliability thanks to the class-focused analysis, providing an efficient tool for monitoring observatories which require real-time solutions.