Reconstruction of fiber grating period profiles by use of Wigner-Ville distributions and spectrograms

The grating-period profile and length of an arbitrary fiber Bragg grating structure can be reconstructed from the structure's reflection response by use of a time-frequency signal representation based on the well-known Wigner-Ville distribution and spectrogram. We present a detailed description of this synthesis technique. By means of numerical simulations, the technique is tested with several fiber grating structures. In general our results show good agreement between exact and reconstructed functions. The technique's advantages and limitations are discussed. We propose and demonstrate the application of the proposed synthesis technique to distributed mechanical strain or temperature sensing. (C) 2000 Optical Society of America [S0740-3232(00)02012-3] OCIS codes: 060.2340, 050.2770, 070.6020, 070.5010.