Pattern Recognition of Optical Fiber Vibration Signal of the Submarine Cable for Its Safety

Abstract

Submarine cables are the main sources of power supply for oil rigs; in this regard, they must be assessed and effectively secured. Monitoring of the environment of submarine cables is rare, and cable faults generally require interventions. This article develops the detection and recognition of shock events on submarine cables using the vibration signals of its optical fiber sensor. The vibration signals from the optical fiber are detected by means of phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\Phi $ </tex-math></inline-formula> -OTDR). An effective fiber vibration pattern recognition scheme based on the time-frequency-domain characteristics (TFDC) and Support vector machine (SVM) is proposed. The scheme uses the TFDC for the recognition of the fiber vibrations, and the SVM to determine the magnitude of the event. Three different groups of data are collected and processed in real-time. Experimental results from multiple tests carried out on data samples show that the proposed method is valid and reliable for recognizing and determining the magnitude of events on the submarine cable.