Signal-to-Noise Ratio Enhancement Based on Empirical Mode Decomposition in Phase-Sensitive Optical Time Domain Reflectometry Systems

We propose a novel denoising method based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for vibration sensing in phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (φ-OTDR) systems. Raw Rayleigh backscattering traces are decomposed into a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and a residual component using an EMD algorithm. High frequency noise is eliminated by removing several IMFs at the position without vibration selected by the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC). When the pulse width is 50 ns, the SNR of location information for the vibration events of 100 Hz and 1.2 kHz is increased to as high as 42.52 dB and 39.58 dB, respectively, with a 2 km sensing fiber, which demonstrates the excellent performance of this new method.