Enhanced analysis of thermographic images for monitoring of district heat pipe networks

Abstract

We address two problems related to large-scale aerial monitoring of district heating networks. First, we propose a classification scheme to reduce the number of false alarms among automatically detected leakages in district heating networks. The leakages are detected in images captured by an airborne thermal camera, and each detection corresponds to an image region with abnormally high temperature. This approach yields a significant number of false positives, and we propose to reduce this number in two steps; by (a) using a building segmentation scheme in order to remove detections on buildings, and (b) to use a machine learning approach to classify the remaining detections as true or false leakages. We provide extensive experimental analysis on real-world data, showing that this post-processing step significantly improves the usefulness of the system. Second, we propose a method for characterization of leakages over time, i.e., repeating the image acquisition one or a few years later and indicate areas that suffer from an increased energy loss. We address the problem of finding trends in the degradation of pipe networks in order to plan for long-term maintenance, and propose a visualization scheme exploiting the consecutive data collections.