FPGA-Based Implementation of an Artificial Neural Network for Measurement Acceleration in BOTDA Sensors

In recent years, using distributed fiber-optic sensors based on Brillouin scattering, for monitoring pipelines, tunnels, and other constructional structures have gained huge popularity. However, these sensors have a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which usually increases their measurement error. To alleviate this issue, ensemble averaging is used which improves the SNR but in return increases the measurement time. Reducing the noise by averaging requires hundreds or thousands of scans of the optical fiber; hence averaging is usually responsible for a large percent of the entire system latency. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on artificial neural network for SNR enhancement and measurement acceleration in distributed fiber-optic sensors based on the Brillouin scattering. Our method takes the noisy Brillouin spectrums and improves their SNR by 20 dB, which reduces the measurement time significantly. It also improves the accuracy of the Brillouin frequency shift estimation process and its latency by more than 50% in comparison with the state-of-the-art software and hardware solutions.