Novel multi-point disturbance detection method for polarization-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry

摘要

Multi-point disturbance detection is always challenging in polarization-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (P-OTDR). In this paper, we propose a novel method to solve such a challenging problem by accumulating the temporally differentiated OTDR traces and building up a two-dimensional temporally-spatially evolving graph, and then using edge detection and automatic-clustering, adopted from imaging processing techniques, to discriminate different disturbance points and find out their locations. Many multi-point disturbance cases are tested and the results show that the method proposed has better performance than the conventional direct differentiation method and the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) spectrum analysis. In particular, the location accuracy has been improved significantly.