A vehicle detector based on notched power for distributed acoustic sensing

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) has been shown to be a reliable tool for monitoring highways traffic in an efficient and cost-effective fashion. Nevertheless, multiple-lane highways and noise sources reduce the vehicle detection capabilities of DAS sensors, especially in high-traffic scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel approach derived from harmonic analysis techniques to estimate vehicle trajectories from DAS data. Our method aims to detect closely-spaced lines by iteratively notching the contribution of the lines already estimated. The results show the remarkable performance of the proposed method compared to the Hough transform, proving the potential of the notched power vehicle detector in a wide range of noise levels.