Classification of leakage detections acquired by airborne thermography of district heating networks

Abstract: In Sweden and many other northern countries, it is common for heat to be distributed to homes and industries through district heating networks. Such networks consist of pipes buried underground carrying hot water or steam with temperatures in the range of 90-150 C. Due to bad insulation or cracks, heat or water leakages might appear. A system for large-scale monitoring of district heating networks through remote thermography has been developed and is in use at the company Termisk Systemteknik AB. Infrared images are captured from an aircraft and analysed, finding and indicating the areas for which the ground temperature is higher than normal. During the analysis there are, however, many other warm areas than true water or energy leakages that are marked as detections. Objects or phenomena that can cause false alarms are those who, for some reason, are warmer than their surroundings, for example, chimneys, cars and heat leakages from buildings. During the last couple of years, the system has been used in a number of cities. Therefore, there exists a fair amount of examples of different types of detections. The purpose of the present master’s thesis is to evaluate the reduction of false alarms of the existing analysis that can be achieved with the use of a learning system, i.e. a system which can learn how to recognize different types of detections.  A labelled data set for training and testing was acquired by contact with customers. Furthermore, a number of features describing the intensity difference within the detection, its shape and propagation as well as proximity information were found, implemented and evaluated. Finally, four different classifiers and other methods for classification were evaluated. The method that obtained the best results consists of two steps. In the initial step, all detections which lie on top of a building are removed from the data set of labelled detections. The second step consists of classification using a Random forest classifier. Using this two-step method, the number of false alarms is reduced by 43% while the percentage of water and energy detections correctly classified is 99%.