Pipelines play a crucial role in today's infrastructure. However, they are easily affected by environmental conditions. Therefore, regular inspections are essential to ensure the integrity of pipelines. This study introduces a new approach that combines variation mode decomposition (VMD) and empirical wavelet transform (EWT) with continuous wavelet transform (CWT) for acoustic data to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and accurately detect pipeline leakage location in the time domain.The acoustic data was gathered in three distinct scenarios inside an open environment, where external noise considerably influenced the original signal.VMD and EWT are employed to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). VMD efficiently distinguishes high-frequency noise and assures distinct mode separation, whilst EWT delivers precise temporal localization for non-stationary signals. Based on the results of VMD and EWT, certain IMFs were selected for further study and SNR is computed among the respective chosen IMFs and original signals to measure the improvement. Subsequently, the CWT was utilized on the chosen IMF for feature extraction, effectively finding leakage locations in the time domain.This study illustrates the feasibility of successfully mitigating noise and extracting signals in open and noisy environments, thus enhancing the accuracy of leak detection. The results establish a robust basis for subsequent investigations in pipeline leak detection and demonstrate the applicability of advanced signal processing approach to real-time leak detection systems.
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