Grant: Idea to Innovation

High performance intrusion sensors are in great demand for perimeter safety monitoring at various places, such as prisons, power stations, national boards, etc. A qualified intrusion sensor should be able to identify intrusion attempts (e.g. entering restricted areas, climbing, cutting fences), pinpoint the location in a timely way and cover a large area as well. Moreover, outdoor perimeter sensors face challenges of environmental disturbances: for instances, rain, snow, wind or animals. The system must maintain its detection ability under these adverse conditions while minimizing false alarms. The low false rate gives the confidence in security system's performance. Optical fiber sensor (OFS) has undergone tremendous growth and advancement during the past two decades since it is well suited in harsh environment and has ability to provide information in a distributed manner with large area coverage. A fully distributed dynamic sensor by optical fiber has been reported by Dr.Bao's group at University of Ottawa for the first time. By an improved OTDR (Optical Time Domain Reflectometer) technique, the sensor has been demonstrated to detect and locate up to 5kHz vibration along 1km fiber within 10m spatial resolution. Under the proposed I2I project, we will conduct a field test of a prototype intrusion detection system that employs our novel distributed optical fiber vibration sensor. Our sensor is superior over those currently commercial ones in the sense that it can provide distributed vibration sensing up to a few kHz. And due to its dynamic response, it is expected to have much lower false alarm rate with the ability of identifying valid alarms from environment noises. Apparently the proposed sensor will fill the niche for the market need of various intrusion sensing and applications. We have discussed this project with at least one partner who has expressed interest in licensing this technology should we demonstrate reliability in the field, where wind, animals, and other elements pose additional challenges that this technology has not faced in our laboratory tests.