Precise disturbance localization of long distance fiber interferometer vibration senor based on an improved time-frequency variation feature extraction scheme

Locating intrusions with high accuracy is crucial for prompting long distance distributed optical fiber vibration sensing systems to practical applications in engineering filed. To achieve the high measurement accuracy and real-time performance simultaneously, in this paper, an intensity-modulated ultra-long distance distributed optical fiber vibration sensing system using an asymmetric dual Mach-Zehnder interferometer is experimentally established. More importantly, a positioning approach based on an ameliorated time-frequency feature extraction scheme is proposed with both theoretically analysis and experimental demonstration. In particular, an endpoint detection algorithm based on differential operation is firstly utilized to rapidly and accurately locate the endpoints of the received vibration signals. Thus the large-band width signals can be successfully acquired by setting an approximate window. Then, the ameliorated time-frequency feature extraction scheme based on a maximal overlap discrete wavelet packet transform is applied to eliminate the asymmetry of the large-band width signals, as it could lead to an erroneous positioning result when directly using a cross-correlation time delay estimation algorithm. Finally, the vibration positions along the sensing fiber link of the established sensing system can be successfully demodulated with the help of the extracted time-frequency features. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, vibration positioning tests were conducted in a real perimeter security scenario. And the results show that a mean positioning error of 11.12 m and a mean processing time of 0.276 s have been realized in a sensing length of 101 km. Thus, it is believed that through continuous technological advancements and refine algorithm optimization, the long distance distributed optical fiber vibration sensor founded on the proposed positioning strategy is poised to play an important role in the practical engineering applications.