A Novel Feature Identification Method of Pipeline In-Line Inspected Bending Strain Based on Optimized Deep Belief Network Model

Both long-distance oil and gas pipelines often pass through areas with unstable geological conditions or natural disasters. As a result, they are prone to bending, displacement, and deformation due to the action of an external environmental loading, which poses a threat to the safe operation of pipelines. The in-line inspection method that is based on the implementation of high-precision inertial measurement units (IMU) has become the main means of pipeline bending stress-strain detection technique. However, to address the problems of the inconsistent identification, low identification efficiency, and high misjudgment rate during the application of the traditional manual identification methods, a feature identification approach for the in-line inspected pipeline bending strain based on the employment of an optimized deep belief network (DBN) model is proposed in this work. In addition, our model can automatically learn features from the pipeline bending strain signals and complete classification and identification. On top of that, after the network model was trained and tested by using the actual pipeline bending strain inspection data, the extracted results showed that the model after the implementation of the training process could accurately identify and classify various pipeline features, with an identification accuracy and efficiency of 97.8% and 0.02 min/km, respectively. The high efficiency, elevated accuracy, and strong robustness of our method can effectively improve the in-line inspection procedure of pipelines during the enforcement of a bending strain load.