A Novel Parameter-Optimized Recurrent Attention Network for Pipeline Leakage Detection

Accurate detection of pipeline leakage is essential to maintain the safety of pipeline transportation. Recently, deep learning (DL) has emerged as a promising tool for pipeline leakage detection (PLD). However, most existing DL methods have difficulty in achieving good performance in identifying leakage types due to the complex time dynamics of pipeline data. On the other hand, the initial parameter selection in the detection model is generally random, which may lead to unstable recognition performance. For this reason, a hybrid DL framework referred to as parameter-optimized recurrent attention network (PRAN) is presented in this paper to improve the accuracy of PLD. First, a parameter-optimized long short-term memory (LSTM) network is introduced to extract effective and robust features, which exploits a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm with cross-entropy fitness function to search for globally optimal parameters. With this framework, the learning representation capability of the model is improved and the convergence rate is accelerated. Moreover, an anomaly-attention mechanism (AM) is proposed to discover class discriminative information by weighting the hidden states, which contributes to amplifying the normal-abnormal distinguishable discrepancy, further improving the accuracy of PLD. After that, the proposed PRAN not only implements the adaptive optimization of network parameters, but also enlarges the contribution of normal-abnormal discrepancy, thereby overcoming the drawbacks of instability and poor generalization. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed PRAN for PLD.