Providence Awarded Patent for Automatic Image Processing for Leak Detection
9/19/2011
Providence today announces the receipt of a United States Patent No. 8,009,932 B2 for Automatic Alignment of Video Frames for Image Processing. Liming Zhou, PhD, and Yousheng Zeng, PhD, PE, at Providence are the inventors of this system. Dr. Zeng explains, “This technology was developed to enable a new way of detecting hydrocarbon leaks from process equipment in order to reduce safety risks and minimize air pollution. The current common method of leak detection requires a technician to manually ‘sniff’ individual process components such as flanges using handheld instruments. This method is widely used to comply with EPA Leak Detection and Repair (LDAR) regulations, but is very labor intensive due to a large number of components at a refinery or chemical plant that must be checked on a quarterly basis. The industry has been working with the EPA to develop a new method called ‘Smart LDAR’. Smart LDAR uses a special Infrared (IR) camera that can ‘see’ the hydrocarbon vapors that otherwise are not visible. Smart LDAR allows a technician to check a much larger number of components in a day. Providence has developed a more advanced approach that uses computer image processing to replace human eyes behind the IR camera. The new approach is called the Third Generation LDAR (or LDAR3). This patent is one of the enabling technologies for LDAR3.”