An Automatic Defect Detection System for Petrochemical Pipeline Based on Cycle-GAN and YOLO v5

Defect detection of petrochemical pipelines is an important task for industrial production safety. At present, pipeline defect detection mainly relies on closed circuit television method (CCTV) to take video of the pipeline inner wall and then detect the defective area manually, so the detection is very time-consuming and has a high rate of false and missed detections. To solve the above issues, we proposed an automatic defect detection system for petrochemical pipeline based on Cycle-GAN and improved YOLO v5. Firstly, in order to create the pipeline defect dataset, the original pipeline videos need pre-processing, which includes frame extraction, unfolding, illumination balancing, and image stitching to create coherent and tiled pipeline inner wall images. Secondly, aiming at the problems of small amount of samples and the imbalance of defect and non-defect classes, a sample enhancement strategy based on Cycle-GAN is proposed to generate defect images and expand the data set. Finally, in order to detect defective areas on the pipeline and improve the detection accuracy, a robust defect detection model based on improved YOLO v5 and Transformer attention mechanism is proposed, with the average precision and recall as 93.10% and 90.96%, and the F1-score as 0.920 on the test set. The proposed system can provide reference for operators in pipeline health inspection, improving the efficiency and accuracy of detection.