From Raw Waveforms to on-device Earthquake Detection: Real-Time Seismic Data Analysis for MCUs

Detecting earthquakes in seismological time series is a core task in observational seismology, supporting a range of applications from early warning systems to tectonic research. Typically, seismic sensors passively record data and send it to the cloud or edge for integration, storage, and analysis. While this cloud-based approach is effective in urban or well-connected areas, it is impractical in remote, underwater, or underground environments where network infrastructure is unreliable. In such settings, the sensors must operate independently for extended periods while coping with strict constraints on power, memory, and connectivity. To address these challenges, we present LightEQ, a system that combines an efficient data processing pipeline and a lightweight deep-learning model specifically designed for seismic event detection in such environments. LightEQ runs on ultra-low-power microcontrollers with just 100 kB of RAM, enabling real-time, on-device earthquake detection without the need for continuous streaming of raw data to a central location. We evaluate LightEQ against a traditional STA/LTA approach and state-of-the-art (SOTA) machine learning models, using the Stanford Earthquake Dataset. Unlike existing neural network (NN) models, which are too large for microcontrollers, LightEQ is over ten times smaller than most of the SOTA models. Our results demonstrate that communication is the most energy-intensive task in this setting, and that traditional model-driven filters like STA/LTA are inefficient due to their high false positive rate. In contrast, LightEQ improves detection accuracy with NN, providing a more energy-efficient solution by reducing the number of false positives before transmission. Compared to the STA/LTA method alone, LightEQ extends battery life by at least 3-fold by minimizing energy consumption associated with transmitting false positives to the cloud.