A Rapid Demodulation Method for Optical Carrier based Microwave Interferometer

This paper presents a rapid signal processing approach for OCMI system, which could significantly reduce the complexity of computations while maintaining decent performances. A direct phase demodulator can be pre-calibrated and applied to extract the absolute phase change to target reflectors at different locations, where the strain change can be found distributedly. Theoretical framework was conducted and to demo the concept, a strain test was performed with ultra-weak reflectors (-70 dB) under the OCMI system. The proposed method was applied to extract the distributed stain change along the fiber under test. Compared with the previous proposed method, no FIR filters and Fourier transform are involved. This algorithm holds the potential suitable for dynamic OCMI distributed sensing system.