Volume 73, Issue 6 e70040
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Joint Microseismic Event Detection and Location With a Detection Transformer

Yuanyuan Yang

Corresponding Author

Yuanyuan Yang

Physical Science and Engineering Division, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Makkah Province, Saudi Arabia

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Claire Birnie

Claire Birnie

Physical Science and Engineering Division, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Makkah Province, Saudi Arabia

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Tariq Alkhalifah

Tariq Alkhalifah

Physical Science and Engineering Division, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Makkah Province, Saudi Arabia

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First published: 04 June 2025
Funding: This publication is based on work supported by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

ABSTRACT

Microseismic event detection and location are two primary components in microseismic monitoring, which offer us invaluable insights into the subsurface during reservoir stimulation and evolution. Conventional approaches for event detection and location often suffer from manual intervention and/or heavy computation, while current machine learning assisted approaches typically address detection and location separately; such limitations hinder the potential for real-time microseismic monitoring. We propose an approach to unify event detection and source location into a single framework by adapting a convolutional neural network backbone and an encoder–decoder transformer with a set-based Hungarian loss, which is applied directly to recorded waveforms. The proposed network is trained on synthetic data simulating multiple microseismic events corresponding to random source locations in the area of suspected microseismic activities. A synthetic test on a two-dimensional profile of the SEG Advanced Modeling (SEAM) Time Lapse model illustrates the capability of the proposed method in detecting the events properly and locating them in the subsurface accurately; while, a field test using the Arkoma Basin data further proves its practicability, efficiency, and its potential in paving the way for real-time monitoring of microseismic events.

Data Availability Statement

The synthetic data and accompanying code that support the findings of this study are available here https://github.com/DeepWave-KAUST/Microseismic_with_DETR-pub.

The full text of this article hosted at iucr.org is unavailable due to technical difficulties.