Smart Geophone Sensor Network for Effective Detection of Landslide Induced Geophone Signals

Landslides are one of the major natural disasters and an early detection of landslide can be achieved by identifying the landslide triggering vibrations recorded using a geophone network. The major research challenges in this effort are network energy consumption, noise removal and development of a wireless network for transmitting the captured signals. This paper presents design and testing of a wireless smart geophone network with enhanced signal processing capability at the site for recording and analyzing geophone signals. The system has the capability to detect landslide induced signals and remove different types of noises produced by footsteps, vehicular movement, rainfall, and stream flow, and transmit the event data to a local processor. For this purpose, a simple and cost effective Arduino based data acquisition system with geophone inputs is developed. This system helps in reducing the system energy conception and is highly reliable, low cost compared to other traditional systems. This paper mainly focuses on the hardware design of sensor system and algorithms for identifying the characteristics of geophone signals for detecting landslide induced seismic signals. The characteristics of geophone signals for different seismic events recorded by the system are also provided.