The unreasonable effectiveness of DAS: ML on fiber-optic vibration data for rail monitoring
Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) turns ordinary fiber-optic cables into continuous microphones stretching up to 100 km. By firing laser pulses down the fiber and measuring the backscattered light, every meter of cable becomes a vibration sensor sampling at thousands of hertz. The result is a rich spatiotemporal data stream that captures everything happening along and around the track, from passing trains to footsteps.
We explore multiple applications of DAS along the Dutch rail network. In this talk, we'll focus on two of them: real-time trespasser detection using YOLOv8 image recognition on DAS spectrograms, and real-time train detection and tracking combining classic STA/LTA triggering with Kalman filtering, both running on local edge hardware. We conclude by a short overview of related work on rail defect detection and subsurface monitoring.
