Tensor-Based Approach for Liquefied Natural Gas Leakage Detection From Surveillance Thermal Cameras: A Feasibility Study in Rural Areas

Detection of the liquefied natural gas (LNG) leakage attracts increasing attention for preventing environments and governments from severe pollution and economic loss. Existing frameworks take advantage of stationary surveillance thermal cameras to detect the LNG leakage, which comprises background subtraction and leakage classification. However, these methods are limited in rural areas due to the lack of sensitivity and accuracy. In this article, a generalized framework, i.e., tensor-based leakage detection (TBLD), is proposed to detect LNG leakage in the rural area from surveillance thermal cameras. First, the proposed TBLD takes advantage of tensor factorization to fuse thermal image and corresponding gradient maps for improving sensitivity. Additionally, a finite-state-machine is designed to maintain leakage foreground along with the video streaming. The experiments demonstrate the robust performance of TBLD in the background subtraction stage. Second, multiple classification techniques are explored in the leakage classification stage. The results suggest that the TBLD can accurately detect the LNG leakage by applying 50 layers of residual networks (ResNet50). Finally, compared with contemporary frameworks, the TBLD has consistently improved performance concerning the different distances of LNG leakage. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TBLD, which also shows the great potential of TBLD in future industrial applications.