An Underwater Gas Leakage Measurement Method Based on Object Detection

The current stage of marine carbon sequestration technology is at risk of leakage and there is a growing need for leakage monitoring. In this paper, we use underwater optical observation methods to measure the volume of underwater in-situ gas leakage. We propose the measuring-after-detecting method, which divides the estimation of the leakage volume into two parts. The first part is a multi-bubble separation method based on detection and tracking. This part separates each bubble image in the background environment from the other bubbles. The second part is a bubble measurement method based on a single bubble image. After extracting the contour information of the bubbles, we estimated the volume of bubbles based on the area of pixels of each bubble. We set up experiments in a tank, using a camera to monitor underwater gas leakage. A dataset of the underwater bubbles images was built and used to verify the availability of the proposed method. The bubble detection results in validated data were accurate and the measured volume of the gas leakage is close to ground truth, which illustrates the proposed gas leakage measurement method is available and reliable.