Phase Noise Suppression for φ-OTDR With Optimized Minima Controlled Recursive Averaging Method

We propose a phase noise suppression method for phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometer ( $\varphi $ -OTDR) system. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the demodulated phase is improved by the optimized minima controlled recursive averaging (MCRA) method. First, the original phase waveform is divided into frames. Then, the minimum control is used to track the minimum power spectrum of phase noise with Gaussian distribution. The prior variance of noise is corrected by recursive averaging. The attenuation factor is determined by appropriate threshold parameters and the noise prior variance. Ultimately, the phase waveform is reconstructed in the time–frequency domain. In this way, the SNR of the reconstructed waveform is intensified remarkably. Experimental results show that the SNR of the demodulated phase is improved by 9.12–19.63 dB in the range of 20–1200 Hz. Furthermore, the enhancement of acoustic extracted from $\varphi $ -OTDR could also be verified experimentally with the proposed approach.