Leakage Detection and Localization of Water Pipeline Using Multi-features and Adaptive Time Delay Estimation

The leakage of water in pipelines severely affects the environment and economy. However, there are limitations in the effectiveness of existing leak detection and localization techniques and methodologies. In this paper, we propose a novel leakage detection and localization method based on the multiple time-frequency features, a neural network, and an adaptive time delay estimation algorithm. First, we use spectral subtraction and wavelet denoising to reduce the effects of noise. In addition, to ensure and improve the accuracy of leakage detection in complex realistic environments, we propose the use of multi time-frequency features that can comprehensively represent the leak signal and make the neural network more robust to train a radial basis function (RBF)neural network to detect the leak signal. Further, we extract multiple features of the leakage signal and input into the RBF neural network to train. Moreover, to prevent the impulsive components of environmental noise and improve localization accuracy, we further propose the use of a fractional lower-order statistics (FLOS) based adaptive time delay estimation algorithm to estimate the time delay and locate the leakage. The simulation results show that the detection and localization performance of the proposed method is superior to those of existing schemes.