Multi-signal feature fusion method with an attention mechanism for the Φ-OTDR event recognition system

Different signal representations show different unique features for classification. In this paper, a feature fusion method with attention mechanism based on multiple signal representations is proposed for Φ-OTDR event classification with buried optical fiber. Each signal representation is fused after feature extraction to get richer and better features. With the help of a layer pruning method based on attention mechanism, the network size can be kept and avoid computation increase. Experiment results show that this method with 3 signal representations can improve the recognition accuracy to 97.93%, with 3.52% improvement compared to single representation approach. It also shows higher recognition accuracy than the tradition multiple signal representations fusion methods at the input stage. Furthermore, when it is used to fuse four representations, the recognition accuracy can be further improved to 99.11%.