A novel data adaptive detection scheme for distributed fiber optic acoustic sensing

We introduce a new approach for distributed fiber optic sensing based on adaptive processing of phase sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (phi-OTDR) signals. Instead of conventional methods which utilizes frame averaging of detected signal traces, our adaptive algorithm senses a set of noise parameters to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for improved detection performance. This data set is called the secondary data set from which a weight vector for the detection of a signal is computed. The signal presence is sought in the primary data set. This adaptive technique can be used for vibration detection of health monitoring of various civil structures as well as any other dynamic monitoring requirements such as pipeline and perimeter security applications.