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.