Field tests of a distributed acoustic sensing system based on temporal adaptive matched filtering of phase-sensitive OTDR signals

Description:

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) based on phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (OTDR) is being widely used in several applications and attracting significant research interest. The main challenge in coherent detection-based phase-sensitive OTDR systems is the speckle-like background noise which impacts the detection performance and conventional techniques are not suitable for detecting weak vibrations under strong background noise. Recently, we proposed a temporal adaptive filtering (AMF) technique to reduce the background noise in phase-sensitive OTDR systems. The AMF method is based on linear filtering of the optical backscattered signals and the filter coefficients are computed from the observed data.