Automatic Visual Leakage Detection and Localization from Pipelines in Chemical Process Plants Using Machine Vision Techniques

Liquid leakage from pipelines is a critical issue in large-scale process plants. Damage in pipelines affects the normal operation of the plant and increases maintenance costs. Furthermore, it causes unsafe and hazardous situations for operators. Therefore, the detection and localization of leakages is a crucial task for maintenance and condition monitoring. Recently, the use of infrared (IR) cameras was found to be a promising approach for leakage detection in large-scale plants. IR cameras can capture leaking liquid if it has a higher (or lower) temperature than its surroundings. In this paper, a method based on IR video data and machine vision techniques is proposed to detect and localize liquid leakages in a chemical process plant. Since the proposed method is a vision-based method and does not consider the physical properties of the leaking liquid, it is applicable for any type of liquid leakage (i.e., water, oil, etc.). In this method, subsequent frames are subtracted and divided into blocks. Then, principle component analysis is performed in each block to extract features from the blocks. All subtracted frames within the blocks are individually transferred to feature vectors, which are used as a basis for classifying the blocks. The k-nearest neighbor algorithm is used to classify the blocks as normal (without leakage) or anomalous (with leakage). Finally, the positions of the leakages are determined in each anomalous block. In order to evaluate the approach, two datasets with two different formats, consisting of video footage of a laboratory demonstrator plant captured by an IR camera, are considered. The results show that the proposed method is a promising approach to detect and localize leakages from pipelines using IR videos. The proposed method has high accuracy and a reasonable detection time for leakage detection. The possibility of extending the proposed method to a real industrial plant and the limitations of this method are discussed at the end.