Constant false alarm rate detection of pipeline leakage based on acoustic sensors

During the transportation of oil and gas pipelines, there are many potential factors that can lead to pipeline leakage with serious consequences, making automatic and real-time pipeline leakage detection urgent. In response to the inconvenience of manual detection, constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection technique in radar target detection theory is introduced for pipeline leakage detection based on acoustic signals. In this paper, an automatic pipeline leakage detection algorithm based on an improved CFAR detector is proposed. The improved CFAR detection is executed after pre-processing the acoustic signals so as to adaptively set the detection threshold to achieve the purpose of automatic detection of pipeline leakage incidents. A simulated leakage test of a real pipeline is used for validation, and the proposed method achieves detection accuracies of 84.6%, 97.7%, and 98% for different leakage diameter settings, i.e., 5 mm, 7 mm, and 10 mm leak hole diameters, respectively, with an overall accuracy of 94.1%, while the false alarm rates are 3.3%, 0.7%, and 0, respectively, as well as an overall of 1.2%. The results of experimental data based on real scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.