New BFS Retrieval Technique for Brillouin Optical Time Domain Analysis Sensor System

In this paper, Gaussian smoothing (GS), non-local means (NLM), and Quaternion Wavelet Transform (QWT) have been described in detail. Furthermore, a Brillouin optical time domain analysis (BOTDA) experimental system was built to verify the denoising algorithms. The principal and experimental analyses show that the QWT algorithm is a more efficient image denoising method. The results indicate that the GS algorithm can obtain the highest signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), frequency uncertainty, and Brillouin frequency shift (BFS) accuracy, and can be executed in an imperceptible time, but the GS algorithm has the lowest spatial resolution. After being denoised by using NLM algorithm, although SNR, frequency uncertainty, BFS accuracy, and spatial resolution significantly improved, it takes 40 min to implement the NLM denoising algorithm for a BGS image with 200 × 100,000 points. Processed by the QWT denoising algorithm, although SNR increases to 17.26 dB and frequency uncertainty decreases to 0.24 MHz, a BFS accuracy of only 0.2 MHz can be achieved. Moreover, the spatial resolution is 3 m, which is not affected by the QWT denoising algorithm. It takes less than 32 s to denoise the same raw BGS data. The QWT image denoising technique is suitable for BGS data processing in the BOTDA sensor system.