Source separation and distributed sensing: The key for an efficient monitoring

As a complement to classical sensors, Distributed Optical Fiber Sensors now play a prominent role in several engineering fields and act as an antenna array. Depending of the devices used (Raman, Rayleigh, or Brillouin scattering), measurement record depend on temperature, strain, or pressure profile. As the wanted signal is often hidden by noise and other undesired sources, we can express the problem as a source separation problem. In this paper, we show that with the help of recent techniques based on data decomposition and source separation (PCA, ICA NMF techniques) from the virtual antenna, we can accurately identify water leakages from a noisy Raman spectra or a strain profile from Brillouin spectra with a spatial resolution of 1cm instead of 1 meter for classical devices.