Fully Distributed Fiber-Optic Sensing Enabled by Kalman Filtering

Abstract

Signal fading creates points along the fiber where phase cannot be extracted, so they are conventionally discarded. Instead, we propose a Kalman-based solution for ϕ-OTDR full-fiber monitoring. Experiments demonstrate phase and temperature estimation with approximately 15 times better spatial density than if removing these points.

Accepted in 2026 European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC)