NEC Laboratories America

Optical Sensing & Solutions

From early concepts and laboratory validation to proven field deployments on live infrastructure, we develop technologies that sense the physical world, transform observations into intelligence, and enable informed action. Building on our expertise in optics and photonics, we are expanding toward multimodal sensing, AI-powered understanding, and intelligent systems that interact with the physical world.

Deployed telecom cables, urban fiber networks, and emerging optical sensors provide a powerful foundation for observing the physical world at scale. Our research spans forward-looking theoretical studies, cutting-edge experiments, artificial intelligence, and world- and industry-first field trials. We transform existing infrastructure into dense, real-time sensing platforms capable of monitoring complex environments over large areas.

Our research follows a broad sense–understand–act vision. We develop optical and distributed fiber sensing technologies that capture physical phenomena; AI methods that interpret complex signals, combine information across sensors, diagnose events, and predict changing conditions; and intelligent solutions that translate these insights into decisions and responses. Looking ahead, we envision extending this foundation beyond optical sensing to multimodal sensing and autonomous systems, including robotics, that can perceive, reason about, and respond to the physical world.

Our current work spans optical sensing, infrared imaging and spectroscopy, radio-frequency spectrum sensing and AI-enabled sensing analytics. These technologies can detect, localize, and characterize vibrations, intrusions, equipment conditions, and environmental changes along an infrastructure network’s physical route. By integrating sensing with edge computing and AI, we seek to move beyond data collection toward real-time understanding, prediction, and automated response.

By uniting advanced sensing, physical-world AI, and intelligent action, Optical Sensing & Solutions aims to create safer, more resilient, and more autonomous systems for infrastructure, utilities, transportation, environmental monitoring, public safety, smart cities, and intelligent manufacturing.

Join Us

Are you interested in joining us? We seek the next generation of thought leaders in optical sensing for researcher positions. Outstanding applicants pursuing a career in optical sensing are encouraged to visit our careers page to learn more and apply for available positions.

Summer 2026 Internship Applications are now closed.

Exciting internship opportunities for Summer 2027 will be available on our internship page this fall.  We are looking for students pursuing advanced degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Internships are typically 3 months long during the summer. The benefits of working for us include the opportunity to quickly join a project team applying cutting-edge technology to industry-leading concepts.

To apply for a Summer Internship, visit our Internship page.

Learn More

Want to learn more about our optical sensing & solutions department? Meet our team of experts, check out our blog posts, or read our latest publications.

Featured Optical Sensing & Solutions Research Projects

Latest Optical Sensing & Solutions News

Bridging the Domain Gap in DAS: Adapting Vision Foundation Models for Infrastructure Security

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.

Field Trial of Urban Monitoring over Telecom Networks with Rayleigh-based DTSS

We present field trial on urban monitoring over telecom networks using Rayleigh-based distributed temperature/ strain sensor (DTSS), showing the capability of detecting subtle infrastructure signatures including manhole locations, road traffic, sprinklers and underground leakage events.

Leveraging digital twin technologies: all-photonics networks-as-a-service for Data Center Xchange in the era of AI

This tutorial paper presents a data center exchange (Data Center Xchange, DCX) architecture for all-photonics networks-as-a-service in distributed data center infrastructures, enabling the creation of a virtual large-scale data center by directly interconnecting geographically distributed data centers

Multi-Fiber/Multi-DAS Array System with Clock-Free Synchronization

We demonstrate distributed fiber-optic acoustic sensing that employs a mechanical synchronizer to achieve sample-level synchronization of signals across independent sensors.This enables phase-noise suppression and bandwidth extension in standard multi-fiber optical cables without hardware modification.

Rapid State-of-Polarization Change-Point Detection via Minimum Lossy Coding Length

We propose a rapid state-of-polarization disturbance change-point detection and localization method using lossy coding length of kernel features. Field experiments validateaccurate detection of subtle changes and precise localization, enabling reliable fiber identification and monitoring.

Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Multimodal Large Language Models

Knowledge distillation establishes a learning paradigm that leverages both data supervision and teacher guidance. However, determining the optimal balance between learning from data and learning from the teacher is challenging, as some samples may be noisy while others are subject to teacher uncertainty.