Notch power detector for multiple vehicle trajectory estimation with distributed acoustic sensing

Abstract

In the last years, road traffic monitoring based on Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) has been used to provide a cost-efficient alternative to traditional monitoring systems. When processing DAS data, the presence of a vehicle cannot be based solely on a single point of time, due to the noise generated by external sources and suboptimal coupling between the fibre and the road surface. In this paper, we present a method to detect vehicle trajectories in short time windows based on the concept of the notch periodogram. The proposed approach iteratively estimates trajectory segments and notches their contribution in the original data, providing remarkable detection performance in high traffic scenarios. The efficient implementation described in this paper outperforms Hough Transform (HT) methods on both synthetic and real data, enabling superior real-time vehicle detection in traffic monitoring systems based on DAS.