Machine Learning for Turning Optical Fiber Specklegram Sensor into a Spatially-Resolved Sensing System. Proof of Concept

Fiber Specklegram Sensors (FSSs) are highly sensitive to external perturbations, however, trying to locate perturbation's position remains as a barely addressed study. In this work, a system able to classify perturbations according to the place they have been caused along a multimode optical fiber has been designed. As proof of concept, a multimode optical fiber has been perturbated in different points, recording the videos of the perturbations in the speckle pattern, processing these videos, training with them a machine learning algorithm, and classifying further perturbations based on the spatial locations they were generated. The results show classifications up to 99% when the system has to categorize among three different locations lowering to 71% when the locations rise to ten.