Space thermovision monitoring of oil and gas transportation

Abstract

Oil and gas pipelines require systematic supervision and control in order to ensure their safe exploitation, even more so during spring/autumn/summer thawing, freezing and flooding seasons when soil deformation is at its highest. In the article, several ways of Earth’s surface space monitoring are considered. It’s pointed out that infrared sounding appears to be the most promising method of space monitoring the condition of main and production pipelines. It’s due to infrared sounding’s unique capability to detect pipeline’s construction flaws and breaches. However, thermal imaging systems are still in need of significant development, due to high noise and low image contrast levels. As of present time, there are no universally applicable filters, capable of detecting and suppressing all types and levels of noise. Further development in this sphere requires broadening of the arsenal of algorithmic processing facilities, which remains insufficient. The quality of thermal imaging depends on temperature distribution on the surface of the examined object as well as characteristics and parameters of thermal imaging systems themselves. The variety of parameters in photosensitive elements of photodetective device’s matrix leads to the appearance of so-called geometric noises in thermal imaging devices. Correction of geometrical noises in thermal imaging systems is one of the key problems. The approach to the solution of this problem is considered in the article.