Fast information acquisition using spectra subtraction for Brillouin distributed fiber sensors.

The traditional methods of extracting sensing information of a Brillouin distributed sensor is by curve fitting the Brillouin gain profiles along the fiber, we propose two concise and time-saving methods to process signals from only the frequency shifted section(s) of the fiber by subtracting the original spectrum from the sensing Brillouin spectrum. Experimental results validate that our methods can provide up to over 9 times faster information acquisition for a 10 km sensing fiber with 800 m frequency shifted section comparing with the traditional way. The proposed methods could be potentially attractive in getting information for the Brillouin distributed sensors as well as the Raman and Rayleigh distributed sensors especially when the processing speed is concerned. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement