Multi-Scale Frequency-Aware Transformer for Pipeline Leak Detection Using Acoustic Signals

Pipeline leak detection through acoustic signal measurement faces critical challenges, including insufficient utilization of time-frequency domain features, poor adaptability to noisy environments, and inadequate exploitation of frequency-domain prior knowledge in existing deep learning approaches. This paper proposes a Multi-Scale Frequency-Aware Transformer (MSFAT) architecture that integrates measurement-based acoustic signal analysis with artificial intelligence techniques. The MSFAT framework consists of four core components: a frequency-aware embedding layer that achieves joint representation learning of time-frequency dual-domain features through parallel temporal convolution and frequency transformation, a multi-head frequency attention mechanism that dynamically adjusts attention weights based on spectral distribution using frequency features as modulation signals, an adaptive noise filtering module that integrates noise detection, signal enhancement, and adaptive fusion functions through end-to-end joint optimization, and a multi-scale feature aggregation mechanism that extracts discriminative global representations through complementary pooling strategies. The proposed method addresses the fundamental limitations of traditional measurement-based detection systems by incorporating domain-specific prior knowledge into neural network architecture design. Experimental validation demonstrates that MSFAT achieves 97.2% accuracy and an F1-score, representing improvements of 10.5% and 10.9%, respectively, compared to standard Transformer approaches. The model maintains robust detection performance across signal-to-noise ratio conditions ranging from 5 to 30 dB, demonstrating superior adaptability to complex industrial measurement environments. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each innovative module, with frequency-aware mechanisms contributing most significantly to the enhanced measurement precision and reliability in pipeline leak detection applications.