2.2. Typical Structure of Optical Fiber Perimeter Security System
With the development of optical fiber manufacturing technology and related fields, optical fiber sensing technology as a new sensing technology is becoming more and more mature. Optical fiber sensor takes light as signal transmission carrier and sensing optical fiber as transmission medium. Compared with the traditional electrical sensor, optical fiber sensors have the characteristics of high sensitivity and anti-electromagnetic interference, and have been widely used in the perimeter security field. Interferometric optical fiber sensors mainly include Mach–Zehnder optical fiber interferometer (MZI), Michelson optical fiber interferometer, Sagnac optical fiber interferometer, etc.
Sagnac fiber interferometer: A fiber interferometer designed and manufactured using the Sagnac effect. The basic principle is that light waves are emitted by a light source converge and interfere when they travel clockwise and counterclockwise in the same loop. Under the interference of external environmental factors, the light waves in the two optical paths will produce different phase shifts. The phase information of the interference signal is obtained by phase analysis. The structure of the optical fiber perimeter security system based on Sagnac optical fiber interferometer is shown in
Figure 2.
The light beam from the light source is divided into two beams, clockwise and counterclockwise, through the 3 dB coupler. Due to the interference of the external vibration signals, the phase of a certain beam changes, and the two beams interfere at the coupler, transforming the phase change into the change of light intensity. The photoelectric detector captures the interfered light, and the signal processing equipment analyzes and processes the collected signal, and finally realizes the recognition of different signals.
When the transmission fiber catches the external disturbance, the interference phase change produced can be expressed as
In Equation (1), represents the phase change of the optical signal, represents the propagation constant of the fiber, represents the radius of the fiber core, represents the refractive index of the light in the fiber core, represents the fiber length, represents the light wave caused by the change of the fiber length caused by the vibration signal phase change, represents the phase change caused by the change in the refractive index of the fiber, and represents the phase change caused by the Poisson effect.
The advantages of fiber perimeter security system based on Sagnac fiber interferometer are that the optical path of two coherent beams is equal, andis not subject to external interference and has a higher signal-to-noise ratio than other interferometers. At the same time, when Sagnac interferometer is working, the light source should be modulated or the demodulated optical path should be scanned in order to determine the zero-frequency position. If the intrusion occurs at the midpoint of the loop, the system will not be able to detect it [
8]. Therefore, the fiber perimeter security system based on Sagnac fiber interferometer is more suitable for small-scale and relatively simple system structure.
Michelson fiber interferometer: Composed of laser, photodetector, coupler, and two optical fibers coated with high reflectivity film. The structure of its Michelson fiber interferometer is shown in
Figure 3.
Monochromatic light is produced by lasers. After the monochromatic light passes through the 3dB coupler, it is divided into two beams with the same intensity and divided into two optical fibers on the right side of the coupler. The optical signal is reflected on the reflection surface and the end surface of the fiber. Because the two fibers are of the same length, the optical path difference between the two beams is the same. After two beams of reflected light pass through the coupler, one is transmitted to the optical detector and the other to the laser. Interference is generated at the photodetector, assuming that the optical fiber
in
Figure 3 is the reference arm and the optical fiber
is the sensing arm. When there is an intrusion action on the sensing arm, the phase of the optical signal in the sensing arm will change, and the optical signal in the two arms of the optical fiber sensor will produce phase difference, which will produce Michelson interference in the coupler. The signal received by the optical fiber detector will change accordingly.
Because the structure of the optical fiber interferometer is a double beam interference structure, the intensity of the two beams is positively correlated with the cosine value of the phase difference between the two fibers. Due to the influence of external factors, the length
of the middle sensing arm of the fiber interferometer and the refractive index
of the light in the fiber core will change, because
In Equation (2), represents the propagation constant of light in vacuum, and represents the optical path.
According to Equation (2), the phase change of the signal in the optical fiber can be calculated as
Mach–Zehnder fiber interferometer: This interferometeris made on the basis of the principle of optical phase modulation and has the characteristics of phase modulation and double-beam interferometry. The reason for choosing the Mach–Zehnder fiber interferometer is that its phase modulation characteristics make its internal working space wide, and there are multiple choices for the formation position of interference fringes. It is the best choice for observing the gas flow, thereby effectively capturing external vibration signals. Moreover, it effectively suppresses the influence of random interference signals on measurement accuracy. The optical path structure consists of a reference arm and a detection arm [
9]. The reference arm is used for isolation, and the detection arm is located in the detection area to receive external sensing signals. The structure of the Mach–Zehnder fiber interferometer is shown in
Figure 4.
The detection process is as follows. The light signal from the light source is divided into two beams through the beam splitter to ensure that the two beams have the same path. Once the probe area moves, the length of the probe arm, refractive index, and core radius all change, thus changing the phase of the two light signals. Their phase difference can be obtained by detecting the coherent intensity of the two beams. According to the corresponding calculation Equation, we can calculate the force of the detected area.
Suppose that at a certain point in space, two light vectors with the same frequency and phase are
and
,
If the two vectors are parallel, the combined light vector of the two beams is
In Equation (5), represents amplitude, and represents angle.
Assuming that the time interval is expressed as
and the average light intensity is expressed as
, then
If the two beams of light are coherent, the value of
and
is a fixed value. Therefore,
If a 3 dB coupler is used as the beam splitter of the sensor and there is
at this time, then
Therefore, as long as the value of is measured, the phase change can be calculated by Equation (8). Through the phase difference, the disturbance detection of the external event signal can be realized.
Through the analysis of several optical fiber interferometers, combined with the characteristics and application effects of various optical fiber interferometers, the Mach–Zendell optical fiber interferometer is mainly used in this paper. In order to make full use of the information in the Mach–Zehnder optical fiber interferometer system, we established the optical fiber perimeter security system based on the Mach–Zehnder optical fiber interferometer; its structure is shown in
Figure 5.
In
Figure 5, the laser is the laser source; ISO is the optical isolator; C1, C2, and C3 are 3dB couplers; and Detector1 and Detector2 are photodetectors. L1 and L2 are the sensing arm and reference arm, respectively, and L3 and L4 are guiding optical fibers. The laser sends a monochromatic light through the optical isolator to the coupler C1. The coupler C1 divides the optical signal into two equal parts and sends it to C2 and C3. The couplers C2 and C3 divide the received optical signal into two again. The shares are transferred to the optical fibers L1 and L2. The two beams of light split by C2 pass through the optical fibers L1 and L2 and interfere at C3, which are received by Detector2 and converted into amplitude signals; the two beams of light split by C3 interfere at C2 and interfere at Detector1 [
10]. Couplers C1, C2, and C3 and fibers L1, L2, L3, and L4 form two Mach–Zehnder fiber interferometers with opposite directions. The signals received by two optical signal receivers are generated by the same intrusion signal, which makes the signal acquisition more accurate and flexible, and the signals collected by the two sensors can be compared to confirm whether there is intrusion signal.
2.3. Optical Fiber Perimeter System Design Architecture
Optical fiber perimeter system is composed of optical fiber vibration system, signal processing system, and terminal display system. The structure design is shown in
Figure 6.
The optical fiber vibration system is composed of optical fiber, optoelectronic devices, sensing cables, and sensors. The sensing optical fiber is extremely sensitive, and the vibration in the covered area generates phase shift through the sensing optical fiber. The optical signal generated by the laser is divided into two optical fibers through the optical fiber at the coupler. After the interference of the sensor coupler at the end point, it is converted into electrical signals and sent to the A/D sampler for conversion into digital signals.
The signal processing system includes time extraction module, event processing module, and event recognition module. The system detects the digital signal obtained by A/D sampling through the division of sampling rules, and preliminarily judges whether there is event signal through preprocessing. If there is an event signal that exceeds the threshold value, FFT (fast Fourier transform) is applied to the signal and the feature of the event signal is extracted from the frequency domain. The processed features of the event signal are classified by the corresponding pattern recognition algorithm.
The terminal display system is mainly responsible for human–computer interaction. Users can monitor the security area in real time in the computer software. After A/D sampling, the data will be sampled and sent to the monitoring module of the terminal display system to display the time-domain waveform of the collected signals. Template adjustment module is mainly responsible for recording various event templates. The event template is obtained and stored in the database through cluster analysis of recorded event information through machine learning algorithm [
11]. Users can view the frequency domain waveform of the template to understand the main intrusion and environmental noises in the environment. At the same time, the adjustable parameters in the recognition process can also be adjusted by this module. The alarm module is responsible for timely feedback after detecting the intrusion signal and recording the intrusion event.