Seeing the Vibration from Fiber-Optic Cables: Rain Intensity Monitoring using Deep Frequency Filtering

The various sensing technologies such as cameras, Li-DAR, radar, and satellites with advanced machine learning models offers a comprehensive approach to environmental perception and understanding. This paper introduces an innovative Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing (DFOS) technology utilizing the existing telecommunication infrastructure networks for rain intensity monitoring. DFOS enables a novel way to monitor weather condition and environmental changes, provides real-time, continuous, and precise measurements over large areas and delivers comprehensive insights beyond the visible spectrum. We use rain intensity as an example to demonstrate the sensing capabilities of DFOS system. To enhance the rain sensing performance, we introduce a Deep Phase-Magnitude Network (DFMN) divide the raw sensing data into phase and magnitude component, allowing targeted feature learning on each component independently. Furthermore, we propose a Phase Frequency learnable filter (PFLF) for the phase component filtering and conduct standard convolution layers on the magnitude component, leveraging the inherent physical properties of optical fiber sensing. We formulate the phase-magnitude channel into a parallel network and subsequently fuse the features for a comprehensive analysis in the end. Experimental results on the collected fiber sensing data show that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art approaches.