High-Performance Distributed Acoustic Sensing with Coherent Detection

Distributed fiber acoustic sensing (DAS) has appealing application prospects. DAS is usually based on phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR) and similar techniques, which can sense the phase change of in-fiber Rayleigh backscattering light caused by the outside perturbation. Coherent detection, which can recover both the intensity and phase of backscattered light, has contributed to a rapid development of DAS technologies in recent years. In this paper, the major advancements of DAS coherent detection from UESTC group are discussed.