Research on fiber OTDR signal recognition and classification based on the ViT model

Abstract

In the field of event recognition for phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (-OTDR), convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been the mainstream tool. However, Transformer models, with their self-attention mechanism, have provided a new perspective for image recognition tasks. This paper proposes a -OTDR event recognition method based on the Transformer model and experimentally demonstrates its significant advantages over CNNs. The method utilizes an attention-based feature extraction approach to recognize distributed fiber optic sensing signals in a phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometer (-OTDR). In perimeter defense applications, various interferences and noise severely affect the recognition of -OTDR sensing signals, leading to false alarms, making accurate signal recognition both challenging and necessary. Extracting signal features and using machine learning classification models to recognize signals has been a research hotspot in recent years. The effectiveness of feature extraction is crucial to classification performance. This project introduces a temporal-spatial dual attention mechanism into the feature extraction of fiber optic sensing signals to improve the accuracy and robustness of signal recognition.