Detection of tunnel excavation using fiber optic reflectometry: experimental validation

Cross-border smuggling tunnels enable unmonitored movement of people and goods, and pose a severe threat to homeland security. In recent years, we have been working on the development of a system based on fiber-optic Brillouin time domain reflectometry (BOTDR) for detecting tunnel excavation. In two previous SPIE publications we have reported the initial development of the system as well as its validation using small-scale experiments. This paper reports, for the first time, results of full-scale experiments and discusses the system performance. The results confirm that distributed measurement of strain profiles in fiber cables buried at shallow depth enable detection of tunnel excavation, and by proper data processing, these measurements enable precise localization of the tunnel, as well as reasonable estimation of its depth.