TY - JOUR

T1 - UAV-based thermal anomaly detection for distributed heating networks

AU - Sledz, A.

AU - Unger, J.

AU - Heipke, C.

N1 - Funding Information: The work is supported by the Arbeitsgemeinschaft industrieller Forschungsvereinigungen (AiF) under IGF-grant no. 19768 N. This support is gratefully acknowledged. The authors would like to thank our partners Fernwärme-Forschungsinstitut (FFI) GmbH, Hemmingen (Germany) and Enercity AG, Hannover (Germany), and in particular Volker Herbst (FFI) and Werner Manthey (Enercity) for their strong support.

PY - 2020/8/6

Y1 - 2020/8/6

N2 - District Heating Systems (DHS) distribute heat in terms of hot water or steam. Loss of media (water or steam), and thus energy, is expensive and has a negative impact on the environment. It is therefore of great interest to develop techniques to detect and localize potential leakages fast and cost-effectively. To avoid interference with the operating process of a DHS, airborne thermography comes into place. The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) as a flexible and low-cost platform equipped with a Thermal InfraRed (TIR) camera is a promising alternative to a conventional manned flight.This paper describes a method for automatic thermal anomaly detection of a DHS. Thermal data acquisition using a UAV is followed by photogrammetric processing of the TIR images. In this way, a thermal orthophoto is produced. The next step is an identification of anomalies by means of image analysis. We apply the Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) blob detector to find high temperature regions in areas of interest of a thermal orthomosaic. This area of interest is defined around the DHS position in the images as defined in a Geographic Information System. Finally, segmentation and classification are employed to reduce false alarms and localize thermal anomalies. An experimental evaluation using real-world data is presented, showing that the developed method deliverers promising results.

AB - District Heating Systems (DHS) distribute heat in terms of hot water or steam. Loss of media (water or steam), and thus energy, is expensive and has a negative impact on the environment. It is therefore of great interest to develop techniques to detect and localize potential leakages fast and cost-effectively. To avoid interference with the operating process of a DHS, airborne thermography comes into place. The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) as a flexible and low-cost platform equipped with a Thermal InfraRed (TIR) camera is a promising alternative to a conventional manned flight.This paper describes a method for automatic thermal anomaly detection of a DHS. Thermal data acquisition using a UAV is followed by photogrammetric processing of the TIR images. In this way, a thermal orthophoto is produced. The next step is an identification of anomalies by means of image analysis. We apply the Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) blob detector to find high temperature regions in areas of interest of a thermal orthomosaic. This area of interest is defined around the DHS position in the images as defined in a Geographic Information System. Finally, segmentation and classification are employed to reduce false alarms and localize thermal anomalies. An experimental evaluation using real-world data is presented, showing that the developed method deliverers promising results.

KW - Distributed heating network

KW - Photogrammetry

KW - Thermal infrared imaging

KW - UAV

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85091164666&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIII-B1-2020-499-2020

DO - 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIII-B1-2020-499-2020

M3 - Conference article

AN - SCOPUS:85091164666

VL - 43

SP - 499

EP - 505

JO - International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences - ISPRS Archives

JF - International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences - ISPRS Archives

SN - 1682-1750

IS - B1

T2 - 2020 24th ISPRS Congress - Technical Commission I

Y2 - 31 August 2020 through 2 September 2020

ER -