Real-Time Remote Localization of Gas Pipe Leakage Using Acoustic Beamforming and Spatial Filtering—A Lightweight Approach

Abstract

In-situ monitoring of a pipe leak becomes a daunting task, even with state-of-art sensing methods, if the pipe happens to be in an inaccessible indoor location. While acoustic wideband beamforming method exists for the same, the dynamic noise and sensors' susceptibility to malfunction in an industrial environment needs to be addressed. This work presents a joint spectral focusing and fault-tolerant paradigm with a novel sound source separation algorithm as a fallback leak diagnostics tool. Computation and communication costs are reduced by processing voluminous array sensor data at the edge, and transmitting the lightweight audio–visual information to the operator for remote localization and diagnostics. The localization accuracy for the proposed method has been found to be within 5% for different experimental conditions.