Spatiotemporal Anomaly Detection in Distributed Acoustic Sensing Using a GraphDiffusion Model

Abstract

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), which can provide dense spatial and temporal measurements using optical fibers, is quickly becoming critical for large-scale infrastructure monitoring. However, anomaly detection in DAS data is still challenging owing to the spatial correlations between sensing channels and nonlinear temporal dynamics. Recent approaches often disregard the explicit sensor layout and instead handle DAS data as two-dimensional images or flattened sequences, eliminating the spatial topology. This work proposes GraphDiffusion, a novel generative anomaly-detection model that combines a conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) and a graph neural network (GNN) to overcome these limitations. By treating each channel as a graph node and building edges based on Euclidean proximity, the GNN explicitly models the spatial arrangement of DAS sensors, allowing the network to capture local interchannel dependencies. The conditional DDPM uses iterative denoising to model the temporal dynamics of standard signals, enabling the system to detect deviations without the need for anomalies. The performance evaluations based on real-world DAS datasets reveal that GraphDiffusion achieves 98.2% and 98.0% based on the area under the curve (AUC) of the F1-score at K different levels (F1<inf>K</inf>-AUC), an AUC of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) at K different levels (ROC<inf>K</inf>-AUC), outperforming other comparative models. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.