Study on water leak detection using wavelet instantaneous cross-correlation

Water leaks cause the ground to cave in by the outflow of the soil, shutting down infrastructure. So investigation of water leaks is an important issue. However it is difficult to detect all leak points, because it depends on the engineer's skill, and the pipe's natural frequency is varies with its diameter, material and amount of flowing water. In order to improve this situation it is necessary to develop a sensor-based monitoring system of water leaks. Recently the Fourier transform (FT) has been used, but it is insufficient when a sound signal changes in terms of time, like water leak sound signals. In this study, we propose a new method that combines Wavelet Instantaneous Cross-correlation (WICC) and statistical techniques, and confirm its effectiveness by using actual water leak sound data.