A Contrastive Representation Learning Method for Event Classification in Φ-OTDR Systems

The phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR) system has shown substantial potential in distributed acoustic sensing applications. Accurate event classification is crucial for effective deployment of Φ-OTDR systems, and various methods have been proposed for event classification in Φ-OTDR systems. However, most existing methods typically rely on sufficient labeled signal data for model training, which poses a major bottleneck in applying these methods due to the expensive and laborious process of labeling extensive data. To address this limitation, we propose CLWTNet, a novel contrastive representation learning method enhanced with wavelet transform convolution for event classification in Φ-OTDR systems. CLWTNet learns robust and discriminative representations directly from unlabeled signal data by transforming time-domain signals into STFT images and employing contrastive learning to maximize inter-class separation while preserving intra-class similarity. Furthermore, CLWTNet incorporates wavelet transform convolution to enhance its capacity to capture intricate features of event signals. The experimental results demonstrate that CLWTNet achieves competitive performance with the supervised representation learning methods and superior performance to unsupervised representation learning methods, even when training with unlabeled signal data. These findings highlight the effectiveness of CLWTNet in extracting discriminative representations without relying on labeled data, thereby enhancing data efficiency and reducing the costs and effort involved in extensive data labeling in practical Φ-OTDR system applications.