In this paper, aiming at a large infrastructure structural health monitoring network, a quaternion wavelet transform (QWT) image denoising algorithm is proposed to process original data, and a depth feedforward neural network (FNN) is introduced to extract physical information from the denoised data. A Brillouin optical time domain analysis (BOTDA)-distributed sensor system is established, and a QWT denoising algorithm and a temperature extraction scheme using FNN are demonstrated. The results indicate that when the frequency interval is less than 4 MHz, the temperature error is kept within ±0.11 °C, but is ±0.15 °C at 6 MHz. It takes less than 17 s to extract the temperature distribution from the FNN. Moreover, input vectors for the Brillouin gain spectrum with a frequency interval of no more than 6 MHZ are unified into 200 input elements by linear interpolation. We hope that with the progress in technology and algorithm optimization, the FNN information extraction and QWT denoising technology will play an important role in distributed optical fiber sensor networks for real-time monitoring of large-scale infrastructure.
Keywords: Brillouin frequency shift retrieval; Brillouin optical time-domain analysis; depth feedforward neural network; distributed optical fiber sensor network; quaternion wavelet transform.