Towards unmanned vehicle detection using distributed acoustic sensing

Kurzfassung

Within the last decade, technological advancement and research breakthroughs have enabled the exploitation of existing underwater fiber optic cables for monitoring their environment. Those cables are critical parts of the maritime infrastructure and are, thus, targets for sabotage. Passing unmanned vehicles perturb the water column and generate acoustic emissions with distinct signatures at specific frequencies that can be sensed by the cables. In this study, we deployed a fiber optic cable on the bed of a lake and along its shore and detected a remotely operated vehicle and a drone using distributed acoustic sensing. We simulated attacks, analyzed acoustic signatures, and applied a spectral source detection algorithm to the data. Our results show evidence for detecting unmanned vehicles close to a fiber optic cable, both underwater and in air. Thus, this study provides a compliment to existing studies for further automatic vehicle detection and with that a tool to support the protection of maritime infrastructure.