Distributed optical fiber vibration sensing implemented with delayed feedback reservoir computing

A distributed optical fiber vibration sensing system implemented with delayed feedback reservoir computing (RC) is proposed. The reservoir is the sensor. By making the system output close to the target output, the RC system is trained in advance. The sensing process is the RC testing process. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a delayed feedback RC system is used as a distributed optical fiber sensing system, and the sensing process and network testing process become one process. A delayed feedback RC system based on a semiconductor laser is built to implement the proposed sensing system. The signal recognition and location accuracies can reach 100% and 97.54% for two types of signals and six positions on the 1.12 km-long sensing fiber. The experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed distributed optical fiber sensing system. It provides a new idea for distributed optical fiber sensing, and also opens up a novel application of optical RC.