Water leaks detection based on thermal images

In this paper, a digital image processing methodology based on thermal images to detect and locate water leak in underground pipes will be presented. With the advent of smart cities, some countries began to face this problem with technologies, such as Smart Water Grids. However, with this proposal it is intended to contribute with the smart cities context but with a nondestructive and less complex system. Also, it is proposed in this paper the use of the q-sigmoid function that is an alternative to pre-processing step to digital image processing. The potential of this function will be validated as method to contrast enhancement and to highlight regions of interest. The proposal was applied in thermal images captured from the soil surface with an underground water leak. Such conditions were proposed into a laboratory, using an ideal model with sandy soil. The results obtained from this experiment were promising, since it was able to detect leaks at early stages of the experiment, which suggest a potential use of the methodology and the proposed preprocessing technique to detect water leaks.