Abstract
Errors in the extracted key parameters directly influence the errors in the temperature and strain measured by fiber Brillouin distributed sensors. Existing key parameter extraction algorithms for Brillouin gain spectra are mainly based on simplified models, therefore, the extracted parameters may have significant errors. To ensure high accuracy in the extracted key parameters in different cases, and consequently to measure temperature and strain with high accuracy, a key parameter extraction algorithm based on the exact Voigt profile is proposed. The objective function is proposed using the least-squares method. The Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is used to minimize the objective function and consequently extract the key parameters. The optimization process is presented in detail, at the same time the initial values obtainment method and the convergence criterion are given. The influences of the number of sample points in Gauss-Hermite quadrature on the accuracy and the computation time of the algorithm are investigated and a suggestion about the selection of the number of sample points is given. The direct algorithm, the random algorithm and the proposed algorithm are implemented in Matlab and are used to extract key parameters for abundant numerically generated and measured Brillouin gain spectral signals. The results reveal that the direct algorithm requires less computation time, but its errors are considerably larger than that of the proposed algorithm. The convergence rate of the random algorithm is about 80~90%. The proposed algorithm can converge in all cases. Even for the convergence cases, the computation time and the fitting error of the random algorithm are 1~2 times larger than those of the proposed algorithm.