1064 IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 19, NO. 3, FEBRUARY 1, 2019
An Interrogation Method to Enhance SNR for
Far-End Disturbances in Fiber-Optic
Distributed Disturbance Sensor
Based on ϕ-OTDR
Yanan Wu, Sheng Liang , Shuqin Lou , and Xinzhi Sheng
Abstract—In this paper, an interrogation method for a
fiber-optic distributed disturbance sensor based on ϕ-optical
time reflectometry to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)for
far-end disturbance is proposed. The wavelet de-noising based
on simulated annealing algorithm with an adaptive threshold
is utilized to smooth the noises and recover the signal. Then,
the 2-D edge detection is employed to detect and locate multiple
disturbances, simultaneously by calculating the spatial gradient
of the grey image of the Rayleigh backscattering traces. This
method is validated in a long-term field test, and three different
disturbance events are detected and located along a 25.05-km-
long sensing fiber, simultaneously. Experimental results show that
the proposed method can reduce the gain imbalance between
the front end and far end due to the attenuation of Rayleigh
backscattered light, which means that it is effective to improve
the SNR of far-end disturbance and recognize the location of
disturbance in a harsh environment with strong background
noises.
Index Terms— Fiber-optic distributed disturbance sensor,
phase-sensitive optical time reflectometry (ϕ-OTDR), signal to
noise ratio (SNR), far-end disturbance, wavelet de-noising,
simulated annealing algorithm (SAA), two-dimensional (2-D)
edge detection.
I. INTRODUCTION
T
HE phase-sensitive optical time reflectometry
(ϕ-OTDR) based fiber-optic distributed disturbance sen-
sor (FDDS) [1]–[3] has attracted the attention of researchers
for numerous applications in the intrusion pre-warming
[4]–[6], oil and gas pipelines monitoring [7]–[9],
structural health monitoring [10], real-time position and
speed monitoring of trains [11]–[14]. Compared with the
interferometric FDDS [15], [16], ϕ-OTDR has the intrinsic
Manuscript received September 29, 2018; accepted October 11, 2018. Date
of publication October 26, 2018; date of current version January 11, 2019.
This work was supported in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the
Central Universities under Grant 2018JBM070 and in part by the National Nat-
ural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61775014 and Grant 61675019.
The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for
publication was Dr. Carlos Marques. (Yanan Wu and Sheng Liang contributed
equally to this work.) (Corresponding author: Shuqin Lou.)
Y. Wu and S. Lou are with the School of Electronic and Information
Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China (e-mail:
16120144@bjtu.edu.cn; shqlou@bjtu.edu.cn).
S. Liang and X. Sheng are with the School of Science, Beijing
Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China (e-mail: shliang@bjtu.edu.cn;
xzhsheng@bjtu.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSEN.2018.2878238
advantages including simple structure with only one sensing
fiber, long-distance monitoring and multi-disturbance detecting
simultaneously [17]–[21].
Since ϕ-OTDR was first proposed by H. Taylor in 1993 [22],
then, the performances have been greatly improved. The
sensing range of ϕ-OTDR is remarkably extended. The ultra-
long ϕ-OTDRs for high-sensitivity detection over 128 km
and 175 km are presented [23], [24]. However, there is a
following problem that when there are multiple disturbances
simultaneously applied on the long-distance sensing fiber, the
far-end disturbance usually has a relatively low signal to noise
ratio (SNR) due to the light attenuation that would result
in degraded sensitivity for all disturbances. Therefore, some
works to improve the SNR of ϕ-OTDR are reported. By using
a laser with a 5 kHz linewidth, a ϕ-OTDR with a higher SNR
and better sensitivity is realized [25]. A coherent DFB laser
is utilized as the light source to improve the sensitivity and
SNR of ϕ-OTDR for detecting intruder with the underground
sensing fiber cable [26]. However, such laser sources are
rather cost expensively. The influence of pulsed light power
on ϕ-OTDR is discussed, and it is found that the higher
peak power of pulsed light is, the greater the blind area of
the system starting from certain threshold value is, which
is due to the modulation instability in Erbium-doped fiber
amplifier [27].
In addition to increase output power of laser, some
other methods of adding amplifiers or repeaters to ϕ-OTDR
to improve SNR are also proposed. The Raman amplifica-
tion [20], [28], [29], Brillouin amplification [30] or Erbium-
doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) [31] have been utilized.
However, the amplifiers and repeaters will cause relative
intensity noise (RIN), coherent and amplifier spontaneous
emission (ASE) noises. In order to reduce RIN, coherent and
ASE noises in ϕ-OTDR, some suitable design schemes of
the amplification and modulation of pulses is proposed [32].
Various techniques with modified pulse for ϕ-OTDR are
proposed to reduce noises and improve SNR. A chirped pulse
amplification can realize an SNR increase of 20 dB without
sacrificing spatial resolution through a traditional ϕ-OTDR
scheme and two linearly-chirped fiber Bragg gratings [33].
The high extinction-ratio (ER) square pulses based on self-
phase modulation of sinusoidally modulated optical signals
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