Denoising optical time-domain reflectometry signals

An Optical Time-Domain Reflectometer (OTDR) apparatus comprising:

• an acquisition module configured to apply OTDR pulses to a fiber under test and receive noisy acquisition sets based thereon;
• a denoising module connected to the acquisition module and configured to receive the noisy acquisition sets therefrom, wherein the denoising module is a pre-trained machine learning model configured to simultaneously use spatial information and temporal information associated with the noisy acquisition sets to filter out noise in the noisy acquisition sets;
• and
• a trace analysis module connected to the denoising module and configured to use outputs from the denoising module to provide a denoised OTDR trace.

A non-transitory computer-readable medium comprising instructions that, when executed, cause one or more processor to perform steps of:

• applying Optical Time-Domain Reflectometry (OTDR) pulses to a fiber under test and receiving noisy acquisition sets of the fiber under test;
• processing the noisy acquisition sets with a denoising model that is a pre-trained machine learning model configured to simultaneously use spatial information and temporal information associated with the noisy acquisition sets to filter out noise;
• and
• analyzing outputs from the denoising model to determine characteristics of the fiber under test.