Research of the Vibration Source Tracking in Phase-Sensitive Optical Time-Domain Reflectometry Signals Based by Image Processing Method

This paper aims to improve the source tracking efficiency of distributed vibration signals generated by phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (phi-OTDR). Considering the two dimensions (time and length) of phi-OTDR signals, the authors saved and processed these signals as images after particle filtering. The filtering method could save 0.1% of hard drive space without sacrificing the original features of the signals. Then, an integrated feature extraction method was proposed to further process the generated image. The method combines three individual extraction methods, namely, texture feature extraction, shape feature extraction and intrinsic feature extraction. Subsequently, the signal of each frame image was recognized to track the vibration source. To verify the effect of the proposed method, several experiments were carried out to compare it with popular and traditional approaches. The results show that: Hard drive space is greatly conserved by saving the distributed vibration signals as images; the proposed particle filter is a desirable way to screen the vibration signals for monitoring; the integrated feature extraction outperforms the individual extraction methods for texture features, shape features and intrinsic features; the proposed method has a better effect than other popular integrated feature extraction methods; and, the signal source tracking method has little impact on the positioning accuracy of the vibration source. The research findings provide important insights into the source tracking of phi-OTDR signals.