Overcoming Challenges of Distributed Fiber-Optic Sensing for Highway Traffic Monitoring

This work presents a wide-area highway monitoring system based on distributed fiber-optic sensing (DFOS) as a cost-effective way of gathering traffic information at numerous sensing points along a fiber cable. The primary advantage of our proposed DFOS system is that it utilizes an existing fiber cable buried beneath the highway to detect and localize the vibrations of passing vehicles. Each section along the fiber cable acts as a sensing point and registers the vibration of nearby vehicles. The amplitude and location of vibrations as measured by DFOS can supplement the information obtained from existing point sensor systems (traffic camera, inductive loop detector) which are typically installed hundreds of meters apart. We trained a neural network for speed estimation ( SpeedNet) and also proposed novel solutions to some of the challenges posed when using DFOS to monitor traffic. To demonstrate the potential of DFOS, we conducted a field test for two days on a 45-km section of the Tomei expressway in Japan. Our proposed SpeedNet model estimated average traffic speeds every minute for an overall accuracy of over 90% as compared with existing loop detector-based sensors. As cameras suffer from weather and intensity changes, and loop detectors can be difficult to install at multiple locations, monitoring traffic using DFOS over an existing fiber-optic cable shows tremendous potential.