Detection and estimation of connection splice events in fiber optics givennoisy OTDR data - Part I: GSR/MDL method

This paper proposes a novel method of detecting and locating connection spl ice faults (events) in fiber optics by the digital signal processing (DSP) of noisy optical, time-domain reflectometry (OTDR) data, This is motivated by the fact that as fiber becomes more widely adopted as a communications m edium, methods of automated fault detection/location will become more impor tant. The approach taken is to use Gabor series expansion coefficients to c oarsely localize the faults. Due to the presence of measurement noise, thes e coefficients are random variables, and it is Gabor coefficients with a no nzero mean that determine fault presence and location. Coefficients with no nzero mean are found with the aid of Rissanen's minimum description length (MDL) criterion for model order estimation. The results herein show that th e method is able to distinguish connection splice events from noise and the Rayleigh component in the OTDR data.