Characterizing and Clustering Debris Flow and Environmental Noise Seismic Signals Using Unsupervised Deep Learning

Summary Debris flows pose a significant threat to the sustainable development of mountainous regions. As an effective real-time sensing technique, microseismic monitoring plays a critical role in the detection and analysis of debris flow activity. However, current microseismic monitoring technologies face challenges in distinguishing mixed signals originating from different sources, limiting our understanding of the full dynamic evolution of debris flow events. To address this issue, we propose an unsupervised deep clustering-based signal classification framework, which focuses on analyzing the signal characteristics at various stages of debris flow events. A two-dimensional spectrogram dataset was constructed, encompassing signals from debris flows, rockfalls, earthquakes, and environmental noise. A deep autoencoder was employed to compress spectral features into a 16-dimensional latent space, followed by clustering using deep embedded clustering and Gaussian Mixture Models. Experimental results demonstrate that, after optimizing the feature space and data partitioning strategy, the proposed method achieves an average classification accuracy of 96.81 per cent across the four signal types. Power spectral density distribution analysis further confirms that this method not only accurately identifies debris flow signals but also effectively captures their energy distribution and dynamic evolution at different stages. Interpretability analysis reveals strong correlations between the extracted latent features and conventional seismological parameters, particularly the peak count of the time-domain autocorrelation function and the first quartile of the central frequency. Based on this method, a complete segmentation of debris flow events was successfully achieved, revealing the typical signal characteristics and temporal evolution of each stage. Cross-station validation indicates that the proposed framework demonstrates strong robustness and generalization across different monitoring locations. In addition, preliminary exploration of its integration with supervised learning suggests its potential applicability in real-time monitoring scenarios, offering a novel approach for debris flow early warning. This study presents an efficient and intelligent method for debris flow signal recognition and dynamic monitoring.