Sarper Ozharar is a Senior Researcher in the Optical Sensing & Solutions Department at NEC Laboratories America, where he works on advanced distributed fiber-optic sensing technologies that transform standard communication fibers into highly sensitive instruments capable of detecting vibrations, acoustic signals, and environmental changes. Dr. Ozharar earned his B.S. in Physics from Koç University and later completed his Ph.D. in Optics and Photonics at the University of Central Florida. His academic and research background spans photonics, nonlinear optics, and sensing systems, providing the foundation for his work developing scalable fiber-optic sensing platforms. In recognition of his achievements in science and technology, he received the Achievement Award from Koç University, highlighting the impact of his research and his continued contributions to advancing optical sensing technologies.
His research focuses on distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), which enables fiber-optic cables to serve as large-scale sensor networks for applications such as infrastructure monitoring, transportation systems, environmental observation, and critical infrastructure security. By combining optical physics, signal processing, and system design, his work helps expand the role of fiber networks beyond communications into real-time sensing platforms. He has contributed to projects that demonstrate how fiber-optic sensing can reveal previously hidden patterns in natural and built environments, including innovative experiments showing that underground fiber-optic cables can detect biological and environmental phenomena, such as cicada activity. These efforts illustrate the growing potential of distributed sensing technologies to monitor ecosystems, detect infrastructure disturbances, and provide new sources of environmental data.
We demonstrate coexistence of polarization-entangled photon pairs and Raman-based temperature sensing in a 48-km deployed fiber link. We map fiber temperature changes measured by the sensor to the arrival time delays of the photon pairs.
We demonstrate underwater acoustic transmission of image-derived semantic messages using an over-80-km distributed fiber-optic acoustic sensing link with chirp-coded pulse interrogation,Raman amplification, and fiber-optic hydrophones. At 50 bps with Raman amplification, 100 scene-graph messages (21,193 bits) are delivered without observed errors (BER upper bound < 4.72 × 10?5).
A fiber optic hydrophone array comprising four passive fiber mandrels, interrogated by a distributed acoustic sensing system was deployed in a lake for field testing. Several stationary and moving underwater acoustic sources were localized, continuously tracked, and their acoustic signals were enhanced by beamforming techniques.
Distributed Acoustic Sensing enables continuous monitoring along optical fibers. This workreviews the use of existing telecom fiber networks for sensing applications such as traffic monitoring,aerial cable weight detection, bioacoustics monitoring and PIG tracking.
NEC Laboratories America is bringing a strong research presence to ECOC 2026, the European Conference on Optical Communications in Málaga, Spain. Researchers from the Optical Communications & Computing and Optical Sensing & Solutions departments will present papers, posters, and workshop talks covering underwater acoustic sensing, power-efficient submarine cable design, earthquake and tsunami monitoring through telecom fiber, and forward-transmission fiber sensing.
NEC Laboratories America has formed two new departments from its Optical Networking and Sensing group. Optical Communications and Computing, led by Yue-Kai Huang, and Optical Sensing and Solutions, led by Yue Tian, will carry the lab’s photonics research into new territory.
Distributed Acoustic Sensing may suffer severe cross-day domain shift. We bridge this gap by encoding 1D phasesignals into physics-informed 3-channel gradient tensors andadapting Vision Foundation Models (ViT-B/16), achieving superior threat detection over baselines.
NEC Laboratories America is proud to participate in OECC 2026, the 31st Opto-Electronics and Communications Conference, taking place in Busan, South Korea. We look forward to connecting with the international photonics and communications community and sharing the work we’re doing to shape the next generation of optical networks.
The 2021 emergence of Brood X cicadas was monitored in situ in our testbed using a DAS system connected to an outdoor telecom fiber over a 16-day period. The spectral and energy characteristics of the cicada calling signal has been measured and analyzed.
For the first time, we present an end-to-end AI framework for data analysis in distributed fiber optic sensing. The proposed model eliminates the need for optical phase computation and outperforms traditional data processing pipelines, achieving over 96% recognition accuracy on a diverse acoustic dataset.