Microseismic records classification using capsule network with limited training samples in underground mining

The identification of suspicious microseismic events is the first crucial step in microseismic data processing. Existing automatic classification methods are based on the training of a large data set, which is challenging to apply in mines without a long-term manual data processing. In this paper, we present a method to automatically classify microseismic records with limited samples in underground mines based on capsule networks (CapsNet). We divide each microseismic record into 33 frames, then extract 21 commonly used features in time and frequency from each frame. Consequently, a 21 × 33 feature matrix is utilized as the input of CapsNet. On this basis, we use different sizes of training sets to train the classification models separately. The trained model is tested using the same test set containing 3,200 microseismic records and compared to convolutional neural networks (CNN) and traditional machine learning methods. Results show that the accuracy of our proposed method is 99.2% with limited training samples. It is superior to CNN and traditional machine learning methods in terms of Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F1-Measure, and reliability.