Detection Performance Improvement of Distributed Vibration Sensor Based on Curvelet Denoising Method

Abstract

A curvelet denoising method has been proposed to reduce the time domain noise to improve the detection performance in the distributed fiber vibration sensing system based on phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry. The raw Rayleigh backscattering traces are regarded as a gray image and the random noise can be eliminated by the curvelet transform; hence, the amplitude difference induced by the external vibration can be extracted. The detection of a vibration event with 10 m spatial resolution along a 4 km single mode fiber is demonstrated. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of location information for 50 Hz and 1 kHz vibration based on this new method increases to as high as 7.8 dB and 8.0 dB, respectively, compared to the conventional method, showing the remarkable denoising capability of this new approach.