A Semi-Heuristic Approach for Tracking Buried Subsea Pipelines using Fluxgate Magnetometers

Integrity assessment of subsea oil and gas transmission lines is crucial for safe and environment-friendly operations. These are usually very expensive without employing Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). Buried sections of long pipelines pose a major hurdle in effective pipeline tracking through an AUV. If a pipe track is lost, then the vehicle needs to invest resources to relocate the pipeline. This work presents a heuristic-based method to detect buried pipes using magnetometers followed by a Kalman filter parameterized to optimally localize subsea pipes. Extensive experiments on real and simulated data are conducted to show the reliable performance of this method for tracking buried pipelines.