Cost-effective improvement of the performance of AWG-based FBG wavelength interrogation via a cascaded neural network.

Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors have been widely applied in various applications, especially for structural health monitoring. Low cost, wide range, and low error are necessary for an excellent performance FBG sensor signal demodulation system. Yet the improvement of performance is commonly accompanied by costly and complex systems. A high-performance, low-cost wavelength interrogation method for FBG sensors was introduced in this paper. The information from the FBG sensor signal was extracted by the array waveguide grating (AWG) and fed into the proposed cascaded neural network. The proposed network was constructed by cascading a convolutional neural network and a residual backpropagation neural network. We demonstrate that our network yields a vastly significant performance improvement in AWG-based wavelength interrogation over that given by other machine learning models and validate it in experiments. The proposed network cost-effectively widens the wavelength interrogation range of the demodulation system and optimizes the wavelength interrogation error substantially, also making the system scalable.