STeP-C: Real-Time Neural Compression for Distributed Fiber-Optic Sensing at Scale

Tingfeng Li, Ming-Fang Huang, Shaobo Han, Yue Tian

Distributed fiber-optic sensing (DFOS) technologies such as Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) generate continuous, high-resolution spatio-temporal data at rates exceeding hundreds of megabytes per second, creating severe challenges for real-time storage and transmission. While neural compression methods can achieve strong rate-distortion performance on sensing data, prior approaches either require per-segment retraining incompatible with streaming, or have only been validated offline. None have been demonstrated end-to-end on a continuously streaming DAS acquisition system at scale. We present STeP-C (Spatio-Temporal Predictive Compression), a neural compression framework that decouples spatial encoding, temporal prediction, and entropy-optimized residual coding, trained end-to-end with a rate-distortion objective motivated by conditional entropy reduction. Critically, we identify entropy coding as the dominant bottleneck for streaming deployment. We address it through GPU-side symbol computation, cached probability tables, and parallel GIL-free arithmetic coding, together with FP16 inference and batched entropy coding, enabling a full real-time pipeline built around a GPU ring…