Airwave Noise Identification from Seismic Data Using YOLOv5

Airwave interference presents a major source of noise in seismic exploration, posing significant challenges to the quality control of raw seismic data. With the increasing data volume in 3D seismic exploration, manual identification methods fall short of meeting the demands of high-density 3D seismic surveys. This study employs the YOLOv5 model, a widely used tool in object detection, to achieve rapid identification of airwave noise in seismic profiles. Initially, the model was pre-trained on the COCO dataset—a large-scale dataset designed for object detection—and subsequently fine-tuned using a training set specifically labeled for airwave noise data. The fine-tuned model achieved an accuracy and recall rate of approximately 85% on the test dataset, successfully identifying not only the presence of noise but also its location, confidence levels, and range. To evaluate the model’s effectiveness, we applied the YOLOv5 model trained on 2D data to seismic records from two regions: 2D seismic data from Ningqiang, Shanxi, and 3D seismic data from Xiushui, Sichuan. The overall prediction accuracy in both regions exceeded 90%, with the accuracy and recall rates for airwave noise surpassing 83% and 90%, respectively. The evaluation time for single-shot 3D seismic data (over 8000 traces) was less than 2 s, highlighting the model’s exceptional transferability, generalization ability, and efficiency. These results demonstrate that the YOLOv5 model is highly effective for detecting airwave noise in raw seismic data across different regions, marking the first successful attempt at computer recognition of airwaves in seismic exploration.