Tracking a human walker with a fiber optic distributed acoustic sensor

Abstract

Traditional ground sensors can be used as security systems to detect third party intrusion, but are costly and cumbersome to scale up to cover a large area. Fiber optic distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) offers a solution that economically and instantaneously monitors up to 50 linear kilometers of a border or perimeter with a single system. The output of the OptaSense ODH-3 fiber interrogation unit is spatially dense, coherent and exhibits characteristics expected of traditional strain sensors. In this paper, DAS data is shown to indicate a walker's directionality and support beamforming algorithms for localization. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.