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A Mechanism and Method of Leak Detection for Pressure Vessel: Whether,

When, and How

Article in IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement · January 2020

DOI: 10.1109/TIM.2020.2969300

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 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT 1

A Mechanism and Method of Leak Detection for

Pressure Vessel: Whether, When, and How
Fei Gao , Junhui Lin , Yisu Ge , Shufang Lu , and Yuanming Zhang

1 Abstract— Usually, it is subjective, laborious, and inefficient noise is the main challenge of ultrasonic-based methods. Fang 38
2 about the traditional water-based air-tightness test. In this article, et al. [8] isolated the interference signal according to the 39
3 a mechanism and method of leak detection for a pressure vessel characteristics of the interval signal and its signal-to-noise 40
4 is proposed. First, through collecting and analyzing sequential
5 pressure data, the beginning time of the air-tightness test phase ratio and reduced the false alarm rate of the sound leakage 41

6 is determined. Second, pressure vessels are located using a deep detection. Lang et al. [9] proposed an improved local mean 42

of
7 convolutional neural network (DCNN)-based method and reloca- decomposition signal analysis method to effectively reduce 43
8 tion strategy. Third, a method that employs a subregion voting noise interference and combine the time delay to detect the 44
9 strategy, background modeling, and sequential pressure data is leak location. Lang et al. [10] inputted denoised ultrasonic 45
10 proposed to determine whether, where, and how a pressure vessel
11 leaks. An improved pressure vessel air-tightness test mechanism waves into the depth network and estimated the leakage 46

12 is developed to provide the basic support for leak detection aperture based on ultrasonic sound velocity. The ultrasonic 47

13 framework and improve test efficiency. On the independent wave after noise reduction was used to locate the leak position 48
14 data set, the accuracy of the proposed leak location method with high accuracy, but the leak amount at the leak position 49
is 98%, and the maximum error of the leakage calculation is

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15
cannot be calculated. In addition, ultrasonic-based methods 50
16 2.14 mL/min. Experiments show that the proposed leak detection
17 framework and mechanism can greatly improve the efficiency and cannot be applied in noisy factories. 51

18 reliability of pressure vessel leak detection. Infrared images can reflect the temperature information of 52

the scene, and the temperature around the leak location usually 53
19 Index Terms— Air-tightness detection, bubble detection, deep
20 convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), machine vision, pres- changes significantly. Jedrasiak et al. [11] used a thermal 54

21 sure vessel. imaging camera to collect sample images and further detect 55

leak locations by contour detection and feature matching. 56

Bach and Kodikara [12] applied infrared thermal imaging

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57

22 I. I NTRODUCTION technology to pipeline leakage scenarios, which could identify 58

81% leaks. Wang et al. [5] calculated the leak rate based on the 59
23

24

25
A IR-TIGHTNESS is one of the important criteria for eval-
uating the quality and safety of pressure vessels [1], [2],
which must undergo a strict air-tightness test before leaving
temperature gradient field of the damaged region of the sealing
material and realized the leak detection of sealing material.
60

61

Infrared imaging-based methods can visualize leak locations, 62

26 the factory. For this reason, a variety of leak detection methods
but equipment costs are high and cannot calculate the leakage 63
27 have been studied [3]–[5]. The advantages and disadvantages
amount. 64
28 of current leak detection methods are listed in Table I.
It is a common method to judge vessel leakage by pressure 65
29 When the internal pressure of a vessel is large enough,
detection. Sun et al. [13] used a dual-sensor differential 66
30 the leaking position will generate ultrasonic waves of a spe-
pressure detection method to achieve leak detection of a 67
cific frequency. Leak detection can be achieved by capturing
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31
beverage bottle. Sun et al. [14] applied a differential pressure 68
32 ultrasound at a specific frequency. Huseynov et al. [6] used a
method to the leak detection of space stations, and simu- 69
33 distributed ultrasonic sensor to detect the location of gas leaks.
lation experiments prove the effectiveness and accuracy of 70
34 Xue et al. [7] proposed a new eight-channel parallel scanning
the method. Steckel and Peremans [15] applied a random, 71
35 detection mode, maximizing the repetition frequency of each
sparse array of microphones in conjunction with an algorithm 72
36 transducer, which was more effective in detecting smaller
inspired by compressed sensing to reconstruct multiple leak 73
37 tank leakages. Minimizing the interference of environmental
locations, but the ability to analyze the leakage of each 74

AQ:1 Manuscript received September 29, 2019; revised January 14, 2020; leak location is weak. Cao et al. [16] facilitated an internal 75

accepted January 15, 2020. This work was supported in part by the National pressure differential method in the air-tightness detection of 76
Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61976193, in part by the self-modulating dynamic screw sleeve of automobile, of which 77
Zhejiang Provincial Science and Technology Planning Key Project of China
under Grant 2018C01064, and in part by the Zhejiang Provincial Natural only a single vessel can be detected at a time, the detection 78

Science Foundation of China under Grant LY19F020027. The Associate Editor efficiency is low, and the leakage amount cannot be calculated. 79
coordinating the review process was Emanuele Zappa. (Corresponding author: Exaudi et al. [17] combined pressure detection and wavelet 80
Fei Gao.)
The authors are with the College of Computer Science & Technol- transformation to detect leak locations in the pipeline, but it 81

ogy, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou 310023, China (e-mail: is also impossible to locate multiple leak locations. Although 82
feig@zjut.edu.cn). the pressure-based method is less costly and performs well in 83
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this article are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. calculating the leakage amount, it is usually only suitable for 84

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIM.2020.2969300 a single vessel scenario and cannot detect leak locations. 85

0018-9456 © 2020 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
 2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT

TABLE I
A NALYSIS AND C OMPARISON OF C URRENT M ETHODS

of
ro framework for oil leakage based on threshold segmentation
method, which greatly improves the efficiency compared with
manual detection. All the aforementioned methods utilize
image segmentation technology to segment bubbles in a single
frame image and estimate the leak position and leakage
amount according to the number and size of bubbles. However,
109

110

111

112

113
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in real scenes, bubbles generated by the leak location are 115

dense. Since the bubble image is acquired in view of a single- 116

sided angle, contour overlap will occur between the bubbles, 117

which add the difficulty of bubble segmentation. As the 118

Fig. 1. Traditional water-based air-tightness test. number of bubbles increases, the computational complexity 119

of bubble segmentation becomes high, and the efficiency 120

86 With the increasing use of computer vision in the field of and reliability obviously cannot be guaranteed. In addition, 121

87 measurement and defect detection [18]–[21], air-tightness test the turbidity of the water quality and the bubbles generated 122

88 based on computer vision gradually attracts more and more by the nonleakage location will affect the final leak detection 123

89 attention, which attempts to replace the worker to achieve the results. Therefore, segmenting the bubble to estimate the leak 124
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90 air-tightness test based on the water test. Fig. 1 shows the locations and the leakage amount cannot be well estimated 125

91 process of a traditional water-based air-tightness test, which through bubble segmentation in real scenes. Furthermore, 126

92 includes such steps as installing a sealed stopper, immersing the aforementioned methods ignore the important factor that 127

93 the pressure vessel into the water, inflating the inside of the leakage is a continuously changing process. 128

94 pressure vessel, observing water bubbles, and determining the In summary, the vision-based air-tightness test method has 129

95 air-tightness. Obviously, the process has some disadvantages the advantages of accurate positioning and low cost. However, 130

96 like low efficiency, high labor consumption, and vulnerabil- current vision-based methods [22]–[24] have some problems 131

97 ity to subjective factors. In addition, the way of artificial as follows:1) they are not suitable for simultaneous detection 132

98 observation will affect the reliability of the air-tightness test, of multiple leak vessels, so the overall efficiency of the 133

99 insufficient pressure or inadequate test time. To this end, air-tightness test is not significantly improved; 2) they are 134

100 Saworski and Zielinski [22] combined the optical flow splitting only suitable for scenes with clear water and few bubbles. 135

101 strategy with the Horn Schunck algorithm to detect underwater In real scenes, the number of bubbles is very dense, and 136

102 bubbles and estimate the bubble size. Wu et al. [23] designed the captured image contains a lot of external noise; and 3) 137

103 a semiautomated vessel air-tightness detection device to judge bubble segmentation-based methods may easily mis-calculate 138

104 the leakage of the vessel by estimating the number and size the amount of leakage since the bubbles are difficult to be 139

105 of bubbles. Gan et al. [24] detected leak locations through accurately segmented. Furthermore, a single sensor can only 140

106 extracting bubble edge feature information based on Sobel supply single, one-sided, and incomplete detection informa- 141

107 operator. Suresh et al. [25]–[27] used the synthetic aperture tion, which is not enough to judge the leakage location and 142

108 radar image to design an automatic detection method and leakage amount at the same time. 143
 GAO et al.: MECHANISM AND METHOD OF LEAK DETECTION FOR PRESSURE VESSEL 3

144 A mechanism and method of leak detection for pressure

145 vessel is proposed to overcome the limitations. The framework
146 determines when the air-tightness test starts through analyzing
147 the time series pressure data. For avoiding noise interference
148 in nonvessel regions, it is necessary to detect the position of
149 each pressure vessel. However, traditional image detection
150 and segmentation methods are difficult to apply, because the
151 air-tightness test scene commonly contains lighting effects.
152 In view of the excellent performance of deep convolutional
153 neural network (DCNN)-based detectors in complex scene
154 detection tasks, this article uses DCNN-based detectors to
155 implement the preliminary detection of pressure vessels,
156 which can properly solve problem 1). Since the DCNN-based

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157 detection method depends heavily on the quality of the data
158 set [28]–[30], a data set enhancement method is designed to
AQ:2 159 obtain extra image data. In addition, ROI relocation strategy
Fig. 2. Leak detection mechanism. 0—camera stand, 1—camera installation
160 is advocated to capture bubble information around the location, 2—pressure vessel, 3—right valve, 4—air pipe, 5—testing pool, 6—
161 pressure vessels better. During the phase of the air-tightness sealed stopper, 7—pressure sensor installation location, 8—left valve, 9—
162 test, a method that combines subregion voting strategy and hydro-cylinder, and 10—baseplate.
163 background modeling algorithm is proposed to determine
164

165

166

167

168

169

170
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the leak location and leakage, which gives an intuitive leak
detection result through superimposing changes of each pixel
at every moment. Compared with the single-frame-based
leak detection method, this method utilizes time-series
leakage images, which can greatly reduce noise interference.
In addition, this method is suitable for scenes with small
and dense bubbles, and solves the problem 2) and 3) of false
detection due to the unreliability of bubble segmentation. At
II. OVERALL D ESIGN OF THE L EAK D ETECTION S YSTEM
A. Leak Detection Mechanism
For improvinge the automation and detection accuracy of
the air-tightness test, a new leak detection mechanism is
designed, as shown in Fig. 2. The mechanism consists of
several parts, such as industrial camera, pressure sensor, and
201

202

203

204

205

206
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171
testing pool. Among them, an industrial camera is used to 207
172 the end of the test, the results of the vision-based test are obtain real-time images of the testing pool, while pressure 208
173 combined with those of pressure difference-based method to sensors are used to acquire sequential pressure data. They are 209
174 answer where and how the pressure vessels leak. This method the core of the whole mechanism and provide raw data for 210
175 can simultaneously calculate the leakage position of multiple calculating leak locations, leakages, and more. The working 211
176 pressure vessels and the specific leakage amount of each steps of the whole mechanism are as follows: 1) pressure 212
177 leakage position and solves the problem that most current vessels are placed on a fixed shelf, connecting the mouth of 213
178 methods cannot be applied to multivessel detection. The main the vessels with air pipes; 2) after the installation, the hydro- 214
179 contributions of this article are as follows: 1) a mechanism cylinder is started to raise the testing pool and ensure that 215
180 and method of leak detection for pressure vessel is proposed, all the vessels are completely submerged into the water; 3) 216
181 which includes such modules like data augmentation, DCNN- the left valve of the air pipe is opened, and the vessels are 217
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182 based detection model, background modeling-based leak inflated, at this time, the leak detection framework completes 218
183 detection, and pressure analysis-based leakage calculation, the positioning for each pressure vessel; 4) when the pressure 219
184 such steps like can intuitively answer whether, where, and reaches a specific test value, the left valve of the air pipes 220
185 how it leaks; 2) a leak detection method that combines is closed, at this time, the air-tightness test officially begins, 221
186 background modeling and voting strategy is proposed, the leak detection framework starts processing image infor- 222
187 which is combined together with DCNN-based detection mation and recording pressure timing information; 5) after he 223
188 model to answer whether and where a pressure vessel leaks, test time reaches a specific value, right valve of the air pipe is 224
189 the method is novelly designed, simple and effective; 3) a opened to relieve the pressure, at this time, the leak detection 225
190 leakage calculation model is given through collecting and framework combines the images and pressure data to give the 226
191 analyzing the sequential pressure data, which can answer result of the air-tightness test; and 6) after the pressure has 227
192 when an air-tightness test starts and ends and how a pressure been relieved, the right valve of the air pipe is closed, the 228
193 vessel leaks; and 4) a new air-tightness test mechanism that hydro-cylinder is started to lower the testing pool, and the 229
194 integrates the proposed framework is designed. next batch of pressure vessels is replaced. 230
195 This article first describes a leak detection mechanism
196 based on multisensor information fusion and then details
197 the detection process. Section III discusses the relevant key B. Leak Detection Framework 231

198 technologies. After that, the accuracy and efficiency of the Within the mechanism, a leak detection framework is inte- 232

199 detection framework were verified in Section IV, and finally, grated, which is shown in Fig. 3. The proposed leak detection 233

200 the development trend was analyzed. framework includes three key modules: DCNN training, leak 234
4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT

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Fig. 3. Leak detection framework. (a) DCNN-based training. (b) Leak detection. (c) Leakage calculation.
 GAO et al.: MECHANISM AND METHOD OF LEAK DETECTION FOR PRESSURE VESSEL 5

235 detection, and leakage calculation. In the DCNN training

236 module, an industrial camera is used to obtain the basic data
237 set, which contains pressure vessels of different specifications.
238 Then, an image synthesis method is advised to balance and
239 amplify the data volume to improve the generalization ability
240 of the model. Finally, the training and test performance of
241 four DCNNs are compared and analyzed. In the leak detection
242 module, selecting the regions for background modeling is the
243 key. Based on the prediction of DCNN, an ROI relocation
244 method is investigated to determine the regions for back-
245 ground modeling, and then the leak location is judged by the
246 frequency and distribution of the foreground points. In the
247 leakage calculation module, the leakage at each leak position

of
248 is calculated by analyzing the sequential pressure data and the
249 regional frequency ratio. At the same time, reliability analysis
250 of the air-tightness test is completed. The three modules are
AQ:3 251 discussed in detail in the following sections.

252 III. C ORE M ETHOD OF THE L EAK D ETECTION

253 F RAMEWORK
254

255

256

257

258

259

260
A. Data Preparation for DCNN Training

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For avoiding noise interference in the nonvessel region, it is
necessary to extract ROI regions where the pressure vessels are
located. In the leak detection framework, the pressure vessel
detection depends on the DCNN model. Due to the complexity
of the DCNN structure, it requires as much labeled data as
possible to train a reliable DCNN model. On the other hand,
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261 the specifications of the pressure vessel are diverse. Within
262 the data set, pressure vessel images collected by the indus-
263 trial camera are unevenly distributed in the specification. For
264 example, pressure vessels with 130–140 mm inner diameter
265 and a 550–650 mm height are very common in the test, while
266 pressure vessels with more than 200-mm inner diameter and
Fig. 4. Image synthesis method.
267 more than 1000-mm height are less. To obtain more data and
268 balance the data amount in each category, an image synthesis
269 method is proposed to construct more extra training data,
270 as shown in Fig. 4.
First, masks are manually added into the standard pressure
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271

272 vessel image that needs to be expanded, which is important

273 for synthesizing pressure vessel images with background. For
274 simulating the different pressure vessels in the specification,
275 the width and height of the standard vessel image are randomly
276 changed within a certain range. In the real scene, the DCNN’s
277 prediction box contains the vessel and background. Therefore,
278 the pressure vessel image generated in the previous stage
279 needs to add a background. The background image is collected
280 by the industrial camera and is added with random noises,
281 which does not contain any pressure vessels. Finally, the
282 background image is randomly cropped according to the size
Fig. 5. ROI rectification. AQ:4
283 of the vessel image, and a vessel image is added in the crop
284 region, as shown in the following equation:
285 Io = (1 − mask)  Ib + mask  Ic (1)
286 where, Io , Ib , and Ic are output image, background image, using a random size Gaussian kernel blur, and the brightness 290

287 and vessel image, respectively.  represents pixel-by-pixel is randomly adjusted. Fig. 4 shows an example of image 291

288 multiplication, and the mask represents the binary channel synthesis. It can be seen that they have diverse differences, 292

289 matrix of the vessel image. Finally, the image is processed which is crucial for the training of the DCNN model. 293
 6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT

294 B. ROI Rectification

295 It should be noted that not all the ROIs predicted by the
296 DCNN model are optimal, as shown in Fig. 5(a). To ensure
297 that the leaking bubble information is not missed, the position
298 of the sealed stopper is used as a reference to rectify the
299 prediction box. The sealed stopper position is also given by
300 DCNN prediction. As shown in Fig. 5(a), the red box indicates
301 the pressure vessel region. The smaller yellow box indicates
302 the sealed stopper region. When there is a deviation about
303 the pressure vessel in the prediction box, the center points
304 of yellow box and red box, namely, c1 and c2 , as shown
305 in Fig. 5(b) and (c), are not on the same vertical line. The
306 deflection angle θ can be calculated by c1 and c2 . Finally, the

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307 ROI is rotated anticlockwise according to angle θ to complete Fig. 6. Illustration of pressure changes in a test.
308 the ROI rectification, as shown in Fig. 5(c), where, the blue
309 box is the rectification result. number of subregions of Vi , (x i0 , yi0 ) represent the coordinates 344

of the top-left corner of Vi . 345

310 C. Leak Detection After the start of the air-tightness test, background modeling 346

is applied to the Vi region in the video frame. Ati j is used to 347

311 At the beginning of the test, the internal pressure of the save the alternative frequency of foreground or background 348
312

313

314

315

316

317

318
pressure. When there is a leak in the vessel, bubbles will
generate in the leaking region. When a bubble floats up to

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pressure vessel is much higher than the external environment

the surface of the water, it will move a small distance and

make the water fluctuate. This process continues until the end
of the air-tightness test. However, the regions without leaks
change little. Under this circumstance, a voting and frequency
statistics strategy based on background modeling is proposed
for each pixel DRi j according to (3), t = 2, 3, . . . , m, m
represents the total number of video frames for the air-
tightness test. According to (4) and (5), it can be determined
whether DRi j is a leaked subregion, i.e., if Fi j > 0, DRi j is
a leak subregion. According to (6), the distribution of DRi j
leakage in each subregion of Vi can be calculated

Ati j =
 
−1 
I fitj,k = f itj,k (3)
349

350

351

352

353

354
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319 355

to determine the region where the leak is located. The core idea f itj,k ∈DRi j , f it−1
j,k ∈DRi j
320

321 is as follows: first, the pressure vessel is divided into multiple 

1
322 subregions; then, the pressure vessel image is acquired in real- ACi j = Ati j (4) 356

time, and the foreground points and background points are m−1
323 t ∈[2,m]
calculated by background modeling, and the frequency of the   
Fi j = I (ACi j > ε) · I f itj,k == 255
324
(5) 357
325 foreground points of each subregion is counted; finally, noise
t ∈[2,m]
326 regions are excluded according to the frequency ratio, and the
Fi j
327 foreground points of the leak region is superimposed, and the Pi j = (6) 358

328 leak position is presented according to the frequency threshold. Fi j

329 The method and strategy will be described in detail in the next where, fitj,k represents the gray value of the kth pixel in the tth 359
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330 paragraph. frame in DRi j , I (·) is an indicator function with a return value 360
331 According to the previous section, the exact region Vi of i th of 1 or 0, ACi j indicates the average frequency of background 361
332 pressure vessel can be obtained, i = 1, 2, . . . , n. For obtaining change of DRi j , Fi j > 0 represents the total number of 362
333 more information about the surrounding area of the vessel, foreground points in all frames in DRi j , Pi j indicates the 363
334 the height and width of Vi are expanded to 1.5 times based leakage ratio of DRi j , Pi j ∈ (0, 1.0). 364
335 on the center point c1 . Then, the subregion division strategy
336 for Vi is given by the following equation:
⎧ D. Leakage Calculation 365

⎨
⎨ DRi j = (x i j , yi j , wi j , h i j ), j = 1, 2, . . . , n i
⎨
⎨ In a single air-tightness test, the pressure inside the pres- 366
⎨
⎨
⎨wi j = (wi /n i ) + 5 sure vessel changes with time, as shown in Fig. 6. t1 and 367

337 x i j = x i0 + ( j − 1) × wi j (2) t4 represent the moment of initiating inflation and release, 368
⎨
⎨
⎨ yi j = y 0
⎨ respectively. At this time, the internal pressure of the vessel is 369
⎨
⎨ i
⎩h = h approximately equal to external environment pressure Pe . t2 370
ij i
indicates the moment that the internal pressure of the pressure 371

338 where, Vi represents the exact region of i th pressure vessel vessel has reached specific working pressure P0 , and the air- 372

339 obtained by the ROI rectification method, wi represents the tightness test begins. The time between t2 and t3 represents the 373

340 width of Vi , h i represents the height of Vi , DRi j represents pressure maintaining stage, as shown in Fig. 6. t3 indicates the 374

341 the j th subregion divided by Vi , (x i j , yi j ) represents the coor- end moment of the air-tightness test, and the internal pressure 375

342 dinates of the top-left corner of DRi j , wi j and h i j represent of the pressure vessel is lowered to P1 . The proposed leak 376

343 the width and height of DRi j , respectively, n i indicates the detection method is applied during the pressure maintenance 377
 GAO et al.: MECHANISM AND METHOD OF LEAK DETECTION FOR PRESSURE VESSEL 7

TABLE II TABLE IV
S TATISTICS FOR THE D ATA S ETS U SED FOR V ESSEL D ETECTION BATCH T EST R ESULT

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TABLE III
C OMPARISON OF D IFFERENT M ODEL

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378 stage. If there is a leak in the pressure vessel, the pressure
379 inside the pressure vessel will decrease continuously during
380 the pressure maintenance stage.
381 At moment t2 , when the inside pressure of the vessel reaches
382 the working pressure P0 , the air pipe valve will be closed,
383 the vessel and air pipe form a closed system. Equation (7) is
Fig. 7. Loss and IoU.
384 the basic formula for gas mass calculation. Equation (8) can
385 be obtained by combining the two equations of (7). Assuming
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386 that the closed system volume V remains unchanged during where, n represents the amount of substance, M represents the 400
387 the pressure maintaining stage, the internal gas masses m 0 and molar mass of the gas, R represents the molar gas constant, p0 401
388 m 1 of the closed system can be calculated by (8) at t2 and t3 . represents the initial pressure of the gas in the closed system, 402
389 Under standard conditions, the total mass difference of gas p1 represents the end pressure of the gas in the closed system, 403
390 Q can be calculated by (9). According to (8), the gas mass T0 indicates the internal temperature of the closed system at 404
391 can be converted into a gas volume. Therefore, the total gas the start of the test, T1 indicates the internal temperature of the 405
392 volume difference S can be calculated by (10). Finally, leakage closed system at the end of the test, m represents the mass 406
393 amount L i j of DRi j can be calculated by (11) change value of the gas inside the closed system from t2 to t3 , 407

Ps represents the internal pressure of the closed system under 408

394
m = nM (7) standard conditions, Ts represents the internal temperature of 409
pv = n RT the closed system under standard conditions, t represents the 410
MV time difference from t2 to t3 , Pi j has been calculated from (7).
395 m = p (8) 411
RT 412
m m0 − m1 MV MV 1
396 Q= = = p0 − p1
t t RT 0 RT 1 t
IV. E XPERIMENTS AND D ISCUSSION 413
p0 p1 M V
397 = − (9) A. Data Set
T0 T1 t R 414

QRTs p0 p1 V T s By using the industrial camera, a raw data set with an 415
S= = − (10)
image resolution of 2592 × 1944 was built. For balancing
398
M Ps T0 T1 t ps 416

399 L i j = Pi j S (11) the number of different pressure vessels in the specification, 417
 8 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT

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AQ:5 Fig. 8. Background modeling and frequency statistics.

418 the original data set was divided into four categories according Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) is 1/2.5”, and the effective 426

419 to the outer diameter and bottle height of the pressure vessel. pixel is 500 w (2592 × 1944). To cover the detection 427

420 Then, the four types of samples were augmented and balanced water, the camera is equipped with a 3.3–10.5 mm manual 428

421 through the proposed image synthesis method. The construc- zoom lens. The pressure data is collected by the ZZ-JYB-2X 429

422 tion of the augmented new data set is listed in Table II. pressure sensor. Its range is 0–20 Mpa, and the accuracy is 430

±0.1%. In addition, the image processing was performed on 431

423 B. Setup a computer with the Windows 10 operating system using two 432

424 The experimental images were collected with a GE500C-T deep learning frameworks, namely, Darknet and Caffe, and 433

425 color industrial camera. The camera’s Complementary Metal related network models. To adequately handle the processing 434
 GAO et al.: MECHANISM AND METHOD OF LEAK DETECTION FOR PRESSURE VESSEL 9

435 of the DCNN, the computer has a GeForce GTX 1080 graphics
436 processor.

437 C. Pressure Vessel Preliminary Location

438 In the detection stage, detection accuracy and efficiency
439 of the DCNN about the pressure vessel were focused on.
440 Due to the unitarity of the scene, SSD513 [31], R-FCN [32],
441 YOLOv3-Tiny, and YOLOv3-416 [33] were chosen for exper-
442 iments. Among them, YOLOv3-Tiny is a streamlined version
443 of YOLOv3-416 with fewer layers. After 40 000 iterations, the
444 recall rate of the four network models reached 100%, as shown
445 in Table III. In terms of Avg IoU, all network models have
reached over 95%. In addition, YOLOv3-Tiny’s IoU is lower

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446

447 than the other three network models, which indicates that
448 the model with a deeper network layer has higher precision
Fig. 9. Accuracy versus n.
449 in object detection even in unique scenes. In terms of time
450 overhead, the network model of the YOLO series has amazing
451 performance, of which YOLOv3-Tiny takes only 7 ms to
method based on voting strategy and background modeling, 490
452 detect a single image, while SSD513 requires longer training
which can effectively answer where the vessels leak and how 491
453 and detection time due to its higher complexity, and requires
454

455

456

457

458

459

460
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more calculations. Further, we analyzed the loss of each stage
of YOLOv3-416 and YOLOv3-Tiny during training, as shown
in Fig. 7. YOLOv3-416’s loss falls faster than YOLOv3-
Tiny, and the avg loss is lower than YOLOv3-Tiny, which
proves that the performance of YOLOv3-416 is even better.
However, considering the accuracy and efficiency, YOLOv3-
Tiny is considered as the optimal choice.
the leak distributes.
In addition, a data set containing 50 leak videos and 50 leak-
free videos was also built. Among them, the video resolution
is 400 × 150, and the total number of frames is about
3000 frames. Table IV shows the batch test results of GMM
and ViBe on the data set. The detection time of single images
of GMM and ViBe is less than 10 ms. According to LPR-L,
it is found that more than 84% of the foreground points are
492

493

494

495

496

497

498
EP
499

located in the leak location, and the probability of noise is less 500
461 D. Analysis of Leak Position Detection than 16%. This shows that the total frequency of red pixels 501

462 For testing the effectiveness of the leak detection frame- accounts for more than 84% total frequency of all pixels, and 502

463 work, three representative leak videos were selected for the leak detection method can effectively focus on the location 503

464 experiments, which contain general leakage scenes and turbid of the leak. Comparing with PD-AVG-L and PD-AVG-LC, 504

465 water scenes. The total number of frames per video is about the average number of points of the leaked video is much 505

466 3000 frames, and the resolution is 400 × 150. In terms of higher than that of leak-free video. Therefore, the leaked video 506

467 background modeling, the classical mixed Gaussian model and leak-free video can be easily distinguished by setting the 507

468 GMM [34] and ViBe [35] algorithm were chosen for com- point threshold. It is worth noting that the value of PD-MIN-L 508

469 parison experiments, and the experimental results are shown is larger than that of PD-MAX-NL since the test set contains a 509
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470 in Fig. 8. Among them, Fig. 8(a) is the original image of the small amount of challenging microleakage video. Limited by 510

471 leaking vessel, Fig. 8(b) marks the correct leak location of industrial camera configuration, too small bubbles are difficult 511

472 the vessel, Fig. 8(c) and (d) are the test results of the 200th to capture. In these scenes, it is difficult to observe even with 512

473 frame of GMM and ViBe, respectively. Through comparing naked eyes. For selecting the appropriate point threshold to 513

474 Fig. 8(c) with (d), it can be found that ViBe can obtain more obtain higher accuracy, different point thresholds were taken 514

475 foreground points in the leak region than GMM, but its ability for testing, and the test results are shown in Fig. 9. As for 515

476 in suppressing noises is poor. Fig. 8(e) and (f) shows the GMM, when the point threshold is set between 20 and 30, 516

477 superposition results of the foreground points of each frame of the classification accuracy rate is 98%. As for ViBe, when the 517

478 GMM and ViBe, respectively. Different colors are employed to point threshold is set between 30 and 40, the classification 518

479 mark the frequency of each pixel as the foreground point. Blue accuracy reaches 97%. 519

480 indicates 10–100, yellow indicates 100–149, orange indicates

481 150–200, and red indicates 200+. Among them, the region
482 composed of pixels marked in red is considered to be the E. Analysis of Leakage Calculation 520

483 leak region that the method pays attention to. However, those For verifying the feasibility of the leakage calculation 521

484 pixels whose frequency is less than 200 are considered as method, separate experiments on the leak-free vessel batch and 522

485 noise regions. Through frequency statistics, it is found that leak vessel batch were conducted. Fig. 10 shows the variation 523

486 GMM and ViBe can accurately mark the leak region of the of internal pressure values of each batch with time. In the 524

487 vessel, whether it is a microleakage scene, a general leakage beginning, the internal pressure of the closed system is equal 525

488 scene, or a scene with a turbid water surface. The experimental to the working pressure. Under the action of the high internal 526

489 results demonstrate the effectiveness of the leak detection pressure, the leak hole of the vessel begins to leak, the internal 527
 10 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT

of
Fig. 10. Pressure changes inside the vessel at each moment.

ro
EP
Fig. 11. Pressure changes at each moment.

TABLE V TABLE VI
S TANDARD L EAK H OLE PARAMETER C OMPARISON OF A CTUAL L EAKAGE AND S TANDARD L EAKAGE AT D IF -
FERENT V OLUMES
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528 pressure of the closed system continues to decrease, and the

529 larger the leak hole is, the faster the pressure falls. As for leak-
530 free vessel batches, it is observed that there are subtle changes
531 in the internal pressure values. For this reason, the amount
532 of pressure change inside the vessel at each moment was
533 further calculated, as shown in Fig. 11. It is found that the standard leak hole parameters are shown in Table V. A standard 543

534 changes in pressure are much smaller than those caused by the leak hole was installed on the air pipe for experiments. For 544

535 leak hole. meeting the standard leak hole conditions, the indoor ambient 545

536 A standard leak hole is a component made specifically temperature was controlled at 23 ◦ C. At the same time, the test 546

537 for leak detection. The shape and size of the through holes vessel used a leak-free batch to ensure that the standard 547

538 are customized. Before leaving the factory, each standard leak hole was the only leak in the entire closed system, and 548

539 leak is marked with its standard leak parameters. Since the the internal pressure of the closed system was controlled at 549

540 leak hole of the pressure vessel is uncertain, the real leak 15 MPa. The error can be calculated by (12). Table VI shows 550

541 amount is difficult to estimate. To further test the error of the the comparison between the actual leak rate and standard leak 551

542 leakage calculation method, a standard leak hole was used. The rate under different volumes. The maximum leak rate error 552
 GAO et al.: MECHANISM AND METHOD OF LEAK DETECTION FOR PRESSURE VESSEL 11

553 of the leakage calculation method is 2.14 mL/min. Due to the R EFERENCES 606

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686 oil Seep location estimation in SAR images using direct and contextual China, in 2017. He is currently pursuing the master’s 741
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702 IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit., Jun. 2014, pp. 580–587. currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in control sci- 751
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Shufang Lu was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang,
China, in 1984. She received the B.S. degree in soft-
ware engineering from Wuhan University, Wuhan,
China, in 2007, and the Ph.D. degree in computer
science and technology from Zhejiang University,
Hangzhou, China, in 2013.
757
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718 762
719 technique to estimate the background in video sequences,” in Proc. IEEE Since 2013, she has been an Assistant Professor 763
720 Int. Conf. Acoust., Speech Signal Process., Taipei, Taiwan, Apr. 2009, with the Laboratory of Graphics and Image Process- 764
721 pp. 945–948. ing, College of Computer Science and Technology, 765
Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou. She 766
has authored more than 20 articles. Her research 767
interests include nonphotorealistic rendering, image, and video processing. 768

722 Fei Gao was born in Linshui, Sichuan, China, in

723 1974. He received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in
724 mechanical engineering from Zhejiang University,
725 Hangzhou, China, in 1998 and 2004, respectively.
AQ:7 726 From 2004 to 2006, he was a Lecturer. From Yuanming Zhang was born in Puyang, Henan, 769
727 2006 to 2011, he was an Associate Professor. Since China, in 1977. He received the Ph.D. degree in 770
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728 2004, he has been working with the Laboratory of computer science and technology from Utsunomiya 771
729 Graphics and Image Processing, College of Com- University, Utsunomiya, Japan, in 2010. 772
730 puter Science and Technology, Zhejiang University Since 2010, he has been an Associate Professor 773
731 of Technology, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, where with the Laboratory of Graphics and Image Process- 774
732 he has been a Professor and the Director of the ing, College of Computer Science and Technol- 775
733 Laboratory of Graphics and Image Processing since 2011. He has authored ogy, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, 776
734 a book, more than 90 articles, and more than 70 inventions. His research China. His research interests include Cloud comput- 777
735 interests include visual perception and understanding, pattern recognition, ing and parallel computing. 778
736 object tracking, and background modeling.

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