Field trial of DAS data analysis methods for detecting excavation encroachment

Underground optical cables for telecommunication services are at constant risk of damage from excavation encroachment, so methods to detect excavations around optical cables are urgently needed. In this paper, we propose two algorithms for detecting excavation vibration from distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) data collected from deployed fiber cables. Even though the vibration features differ greatly with the excavation machine and environmental vibration degrades accuracy in general, proposed algorithms achieved highly accurate excavation detection.