Denoising method based upon ECEMD and selective addition for phi-OTDR

Abstract We propose a novel methodology based upon the selective addition to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for vibration detection in a phi optical time-domain reflectometer system (phi-OTDR). The extreme-mean complementary empirical mode decomposition (ECEMD) is designed to break down the original signal into a set of inherent mode functions(IMFs). The selective addition function in terms of selected IMFs is used to determine a vibration’s position. By this method, we can enhance the SNR of phi-OTDR system by several orders of magnitude. Simulations and experiments applying the method to real data prove the validity of the proposed approach.