Urban traffic monitoring using Distributed Acoustic Sensing along laid fiber optic cables

Summary The feasibility of traffic monitoring along a major urban road using Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) is demonstrated. We present measurement results of conventional intensity-based DAS along a dark fiber in a tubed fiber optic cable buried roadside. With only minimal postprocessing different classes of traffic participants can be distinguished (cars, bikes, pedestrians). Different methods for pre-processing raw data are compared, especially with regard to providing suitable inputs for pattern recognition algorithms. Furthermore, the various challenges for automatized vehicle detection and classification related to varying sensitivity and inhomogeneous signal propagation are discussed. Sensitivity fluctuations and variations are in part inherent to the measurement technology and originate in part in ground conditions. The measurement quality and usefulness for traffic monitoring of intensity-based DAS is compared to that of state-of-the-art phase-resolved DAS, allowing quantitative evaluation of vibration signals.