SNR Enhancement for BOTDR with Spatial-Adaptive Image Denoising Method

A spatial-adaptive image denoising (SAID) method is proposed to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of Brillouin optical time domain reflectometer (BOTDR) without deterioration of spatial resolution. Through analyzing the principle of denoising, the spatial-adaptive denoising network structure is constructed, which can effectively reduce noise and avoid over-smoothing. Moreover, a high-similarity dataset generation method is designed to further enhance the denoising effect. The SAID method is experimentally implemented on two-dimension Brillouin gain spectrum matrix over a 25.1 km-long optical fiber with the spatial resolution of 2 m. The experimental results show that the SNR enhancement of SAID method is 21.92 dB, and the data processing time is only 2.48 s. Whereas the SNR enhancement of conventional 10000 times trace averaging method is merely 9.98 dB, but the data processing time is increased to 174.52 s. Therefore, it is demonstrated that the SAID method has obvious advantages in SNR enhancement and data processing speed without deteriorating the spatial resolution of BOTDR.