Blind Self-Supervised Denoising of In Situ BOTDR Strain Data Using TrendBlend-BSFormer for Underwater Flexible...

The long-term stability of submerged sandbars and protected shorelines in large alluvial rivers depends on the serviceability of flexible mattresses installed on the riverbed. Distributed fiber optic sensing is one of the few practical methods for monitoring deformation along these underwater systems over engineering-scale distances. Yet BOTDR-derived strain-difference profiles are often heavily contaminated by noise and rarely have reliable clean references. To address this issue, this study develops TrendBlend-BSFormer, a blind self-supervised denoising framework for in situ BOTDR strain data from underwater flexible mattresses. The framework combines four key features: blind-spot masking, a one-dimensional encoder decoder backbone, a Transformer bottleneck for long-range spatial dependence, and a multi-scale trend-detail blending branch with dual signal-noise heads. The framework was validated using annual and daily BOTDR field data from the Yudaizhou shoreline protection project in the Yangtze River, containing 9343 and 9875 valid measurement points, respectively. TrendBlend-BSFormer achieved pseudo-SNR/RMSE/MAE values of 14.22 dB, 15.03 με and 12.05 με for the annual data set and 5.32 dB, 8.02 με and 6.45 με for the daily data set, improving the pseudo-SNR by 1.45 dB and 2.95 dB relative to the published BiLSTM-CNN benchmark. It also reduced the high-frequency energy ratio from 0.172 to 0.011 for the annual data and from 0.424 to 0.112 for the daily data. The denoised profiles suppress isolated spikes while preserving mechanically plausible peaks, valleys, and short-range fluctuations, indicating that blind self-supervised denoising can provide a more physically credible strategy for BOTDR-based monitoring in complex underwater environments.