To effectively eliminate the nonlinear distortion caused by the modulation depth (C value) drift and carrier phase delay (θ) in the phase-generated carrier (PGC) demodulation scheme, the PGC-PDC-EKF joint algorithm is presented, which combines phase delay compensation (PDC) with an extended Kalman filter (EKF). The θ is accurately extracted and compensated by the PDC module. Furthermore, with the EKF algorithm, the harmonic distortion of the demodulated signal due to the fluctuation of C value is suppressed. The experimental results indicate that θ is compensated accurately with a resolution of 0.01745 rad. The signal-to-noise and distortion ratio (SINAD) of the improved scheme reaches 54.01 dB, which is 18.03 dB higher than the PGC-Arctan algorithm on average. The total harmonic distortion (THD) is as low as −62.28 dB, which is 26.04 dB lower than the PGC-Arctan algorithm. The linearity of the demodulation system exceeds 99.99%. The proposed method provides a significant reference for demodulation schemes of interferometric fiber optic sensing systems in practical applications.

In this study, a phase-generated carrier (PGC) demodulation algorithm combined with the extended Kalman filter (EKF) algorithm based on an electro-optic modulator (EOM) is proposed, which can achieve nonlinear distortion (such as modulation depth drift and carrier phase delay) suppression for high-frequency phase carrier modulation. The improved algorithm is implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware platform. The experimental results by the PGC-EKF method show that total harmonic distortion (THD) decreases from −32.61 to −54.51 dB, and SINAD increases from 32.59 to 47.86 dB, compared to the traditional PGC-Arctan method. This indicates that the PGC-EKF demodulation algorithm proposed in this paper can be widely used in many important fields such as hydrophone, transformer, and ultrasound signal detection.