Natural gas and oil are one of the mainstays of the global economy. However, many issues surround the pipelines that transport these resources, including aging infrastructure, environmental impacts, and vulnerability to sabotage operations. Such issues can result in leakages in these pipelines, requiring significant effort to detect and pinpoint their locations. The objective of this project is to develop and implement a method for detecting oil spills caused by leaking oil pipelines using aerial images captured by a drone equipped with a Raspberry Pi 4. Using the message queuing telemetry transport Internet of Things (MQTT IoT) protocol, the acquired images and the global positioning system (GPS) coordinates of the images' acquisition are sent to the base station. Using deep learning approaches such as holistically-nested edge detection (HED) and extreme inception (Xception) networks, images are analyzed at the base station to identify contours using dense extreme inception networks for edge detection (DexiNed). This algorithm is capable of finding many contours in images. Moreover, the CIELAB color space (LAB) is employed to locate black-colored contours, which may indicate oil spills. The suggested method involves eliminating smaller contours to calculate the area of larger contours. If the contour's area exceeds a certain threshold, it is classified as a spill; otherwise, it is stored in a database for further review. In the experiments, spill sizes of 1m2, 2m2, and 3m2 were established at three separate test locations. The drone was operated at three different heights (5 m, 10 m, and 15 m) to capture the scenes. The results show that efficient detection can be achieved at a height of 10 meters using the DexiNed algorithm. Statistical comparison with other edge detection methods using basic metrics, such as perimage best threshold (OIS = 0.867), fixed contour threshold (ODS = 0.859), and average precision (AP = 0.905), validates the effectiveness of the DexiNed algorithm in generating thin edge maps and identifying oil slicks. © 2023 Lavoisier. All rights reserved.
