Guy D'Urso

A Source Separation Technique for Processing of Thermometric Data From Fiber-Optic DTS Measurements for Water Leakage Identification in Dikes

Distributed temperature sensors (DTSs) show real advantages over conventional temperature sensing technology such as low cost for long-range measurement, durability, stability, insensitivity to external perturbations, etc. They are particularly interesting for long-term health assessment of civil engineering structures such as dikes. In this paper, we address the problem of identification of leakage in dikes based on real thermometric data recorded by DTS. Formulating this task as a source separation problem, we propose a methodology based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Independent Component Analysis (ICA). As the first PCA estimated source extracts an energetic subspace, other PCA sources allow to access the leakages. The energy of a leakage being very low compared to the entire data, a temporal windowing approach guarantees the presence of the leakages on these other PCA sources. However, on these sources, the leakages are not well separated from other factors like drains. An ICA processing, providing independent sources, is thus proposed to achieve better identification of the leakages. The study of different preprocessing steps such as normalization, spatial gradient, and transposition allows to propose a final scheme that represents a first step towards the automation of the leakage identification problem.

Automatic Monitoring System for Singularity Detection in Dikes By DTS Data Measurement

The development of automated monitoring systems for the detection of singularities, such as leakages in dikes, is indispensable to avoid mass disaster. An efficient solution for dike survey is the use of distributed temperature sensors (DTSs) based on optical fiber, offering a multitude of advantages such as low cost, extreme robustness, long-range measurement, etc. However, the temperature data acquired with DTSs, being not directly interpretable, require intervention of signal processing techniques. This paper addresses this signal processing aspect, exploiting the key idea that the temperature variations over the course of a day for singular zones are quite different from those for nonsingular zones. A daily reference temperature variation, which is representative of the nonsingular zones, is estimated using singular value decomposition (SVD). The residue subspace of SVD contains information linked to the deviations from this reference, thus allowing the degree of singularity to be quantified by a dissimilarity measure such as the L2-norm. To detect only the singularities in dikes, such as leakages or drains, a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector is proposed by modeling each daily dissimilarity measure with a mixture of Gamma and uniform distributions. The proposed automatic singularity detection system was validated under different scenarios on real data over periods from 2005 to 2007. The first scenario depicted the detection of percolation-type artificial leakages with their detection strength depending on their flow rates. Another scenario allowed detecting the presence of a real water leakage at the site, which was previously unobserved during manual inspections. The repeatability of the system was also verified by periodic analysis.

Dry snow backscattering sensitivity on density change for SWE estimation

This paper deals particularly with the sensitivity of the wet snow backscattering coefficient on density change. The presented backscattering model is based on the approach used in the dry snow analysis [1], appropriately modified to account for the increased dielectric contrast caused by liquid water presence. It encircles our undertaking of simulating and analysing snow backscattering using fundamental scattering theories (IEM-B, QCA, QCA-CP). The wet snow parameters are chosen according to the area of the particular interest - the French Alps, while the choice of the SAR sensor parameters (frequency, polarization) is primarily conditioned by the initially settled goal - reaching qualitative conclusions concerning wet snow backscattering mechanism. Based on simulation results, we state the dominance of the snow pack surface backscattering component, causing the backscattering to be directly proportional to the volumetric liquid water content. This result is confirmed by the performed in situ measurements. We illustrate as well the decrease of this effect with the increase in operating frequency.

SAR Images Refocusing and Scattering Center Detection for Infrastructure Monitoring

Infrastructure monitoring applications can require the tracking of slowly moving points of a certain structure. Given a certain point from a structure to be monitored, in the context of available SAR products where the image is already focused in a slant range - azimuth grid, it is not obvious if this point is the scattering center, if it is in layover or if it is visible from the respective orbit. This paper proposes a refocusing procedure of SAR images on a set of measured points among with a 4D tomography based scattering center detection. The refocusing procedure consists of an azimuth defocusing followed by a modified back-projection on the given set of points. The presence of a scattering center at the given positions is detected by computing the local elevation-velocity plane for each point and testing if the main response is at zero elevation. The refocusing and scattering center detection algorithm is validated on real data acquired with the TerraSAR-X satellite during March-June 2012. The mean displacement velocities of the detected scatterers show good agreement with the in-situ measurements.

Independent Component Analysis within polarimetric incoherent target decomposition

This paper represents a part of our efforts to generalize polarimetric incoherent target decomposition to the level of BSS techniques by introducing the ICA method instead of the conventional eigenvector decomposition. We compare, in the frame of polarimetric incoherent target decomposition, several criteria for the estimation of complex independent components [1, 2]. This is done by parametrising the obtained dominant and mutually independent target vectors using the TSVM [3] and representing them on the corresponding Poincaré sphere. We demonstrate notably good performances of the proposed method applied on the RAMSES POLSAR X-band image, by precisely identifying the class of trihedral reflectors present in the scene. Logarithm and square root nonlinearities - two of the three proposed criteria for complex IC derivation prove to be very efficient. The best discrimination between the a priori defined classes appears to be achieved with the principal kurtosis criterion. Finally, the algorithm using the former two functions leads to very interesting entropy estimation.

Detection of Ground Movement using the Shape of Brillouin Spectrum

Distributed Optical Fiber Sensing systems (DOFSS) are composed by optical fibers wrapped in strain sensing cables, coupled with Brillouin interrogators. DOFSS are increasingly used for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) as they can provide continuous strain profiles along the optical fiber localized in the structure. Raw Brillouin measurements consist in gain – frequency curves with a Lorentzian shape. Strain is generally assessed thanks to the abscissa of the maximum of the gain curve. Two new factors are introduced. They are sensitive to asymmetry and broadening of the Brillouin gain curve which can highlight strain gradient within the spatial resolution of the interrogator. These parameters could be used to detect more efficiently local events and improve instrument algorithm.

Stable Scatterers detection and tracking in heterogeneous clutter by repeat-pass SAR interferometry

This paper presents a new estimation scheme for optimally deriving clutter parameters with high resolution repeat-pass SAR interferometry. The heterogeneous clutter in InSAR data is described by the Spherically Invariant Random Vectors model. Three parameters are introduced for the high resolution InSAR data clutter: the span, the normalized texture and the speckle normalized covariance matrix. The asymptotic distribution of the novel span estimator is investigated.

Detection and localization of transient sources: comparative study of complex-lag distribution concept versus wavelets and spectrogram-based methods

The detection and localization of transient signals is nowadays a typical point of interest when we consider the multitude of existing transient sources, such as electrical and mechanical systems, underwater environments, audio domain, seismic data, and so forth. In such fields, transients carry out a lot of information. They can correspond to a large amount of phenomena issued from the studied problem and important to analyze (anomalies and perturbations, natural sources, environmental singularities, ). They usually occur randomly as brief and sudden signals, such as partial discharges in electrical cables and transformers tanks. Therefore, motivated by advanced and accurate analysis, efficient tools of transients detection and localization are of great utility. Higher order statistics, wavelets and spectrogram distributions are well known methods which proved their efficiency to detect and localize transients independently to one another. However, in the case of a signal composed by several transients physically related and with important energy gap between them, the tools previously mentioned could not detect efficiently all the transients of the whole signal. Recently, the generalized complex time distribution concept has been introduced. This distribution offers access to highly concentrated representation of any phase derivative order of a signal. In this paper, we use this improved phase analysis tool to define a new concept to detect and localize dependant transients taking regard to the phase break they cause and not their amplitude. ROC curves are calculated to analyze and compare the performances of the proposed methods.

SVD based automated dike monitoring system using DTS data

The detection of water leakages in dikes using distributed temperature sensors is an interesting prospect due to the commercial viability of these optical fiber based sensors. The acquired temperature data, being not directly interpretable, requires intervention of advanced signal processing techniques. In this work, we propose a system for the identification of singularities such as existing dike structures and water leakages. The distances where singularities exist show temperature variations over the course of a day which are different from the nonsingular zones. The different nonsingular zones though show a similar temperature variation trend. The proposed system estimates this reference trend as the most coherent component of the Singular Value Decomposition applied on daily data. The corresponding SVD residue subspace thus represents the deviation from the reference subspace and thus contains information on singularities. The L2 norm of this residue is a good discrimination measure for identification of these singularities.

Scattering centers monitoring in refocused SAR images on a high-resolution DEM

Infrastructure monitoring applications can require the tracking of slowly moving points of a certain structure. Given a certain point from a structure to be monitored, in the context of available SAR products where the image is already focused in a slant range - azimuth grid, it is not obvious if this point is the scattering center, if it is in layover or if it is visible from the respective orbit. This paper proposes a scattering center monitoring procedure based on refocusing a set of SAR images on a provided high-resolution DEM of the structure. The scattering centers of the refocused image are detected in the 4-D tomography framework by testing if the main response is at zero elevation in the local elevation-velocity spectral distribution obtained using the Capon estimator. The algorithm is validated on real data acquired with the TerraSAR-X satellite over the Puylaurent water dam in France during March-June 2012. The relative displacements between scattering regions show very good agreement with the in situ measurements.