Low computational cost distributed acoustic sensing using analog I/Q demodulation

Distributed acoustic sensing based on phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR) has been widely used in many fields. Phase demodulation of the Φ-OTDR signal is essential for undistorted acoustic measurement. Digital coherent detection is a universal method to implement phase demodulation, but it may cause severe computational burden. In this paper, analog I/Q demodulation is introduced into the Φ-OTDR based DAS system to solve this problem, which can directly obtain the I and Q components of the beat signal without any digital processing, meaning that the computational cost can be sharply reduced. Besides, the sampling frequency of the data acquisition card can theoretically be lower than the beat frequency as the spectrum aliasing would not affect the demodulation results, thus further reducing the data volume of the system. Experimental results show that the proposed DAS system can demodulate the phase signal with good linearity and wide frequency response range. It can also adequately recover the sound signal sensed by the optical fiber, indicating that it can be a promising solution for computational-cost-sensitive distributed acoustic sensing applications.