MWIRGas-YOLO: Gas Leakage Detection Based on Mid-Wave Infrared Imaging

The integration of visual algorithms with infrared imaging technology has become an effective tool for industrial gas leak detection. However, existing research has mostly focused on simple scenarios where a gas plume is clearly visible, with limited studies on detecting gas in complex scenes where target contours are blurred and contrast is low. This paper uses a cooled mid-wave infrared (MWIR) system to provide high sensitivity and fast response imaging and proposes the MWIRGas-YOLO network for detecting gas leaks in mid-wave infrared imaging. This network effectively detects low-contrast gas leakage and segments the gas plume within the scene. In MWIRGas-YOLO, it utilizes the global attention mechanism (GAM) to fully focus on gas plume targets during feature fusion, adds a small target detection layer to enhance information on small-sized targets, and employs transfer learning of similar features from visible light smoke to provide the model with prior knowledge of infrared gas features. Using a cooled mid-wave infrared imager to collect gas leak images, the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the performance over the original model. The segment mean average precision reached 96.1% (mAP50) and 47.6% (mAP50:95), respectively, outperforming the other mainstream algorithms. This can provide an effective reference for research on infrared imaging for gas leak detection.