Vehicle Tracking in Land Roads and Railways Using DAS Systems

Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) systems are fiber optic based opto-electronic devices. DAS systems provide acoustic surveillance and threat identification capabilities along linear assets using standard underground fiber-optic cables. DAS sensors connected to fiber-optic cables installed along land roads and railways can detect tracks of vehicles. Determining the position, direction and speed of the moving vehicles and discriminating multiple targets is critical for timely threat identification and road traffic management. In this article by using DAS sensor data, obtained using the phase optical time domain reflectometry (phase-OTDR) technique, vehicle tracking application is realized with Joint Probabilistic Data Association (JPDA) filter. In rural areas; vehicles could be detected with 97% detection rate during passages longer than 1 minutes by the proposed algorithm. Algorithm produced multiple alarms for the 18% of the moving targets.