Detection of Oscillations in Process Control Loops from Visual Image Space Using Deep Convolutional Networks

Oscillation detection has been a hot research topic in industries due to the high incidence of oscillation loops and their negative impact on plant profitability. Although numerous automatic detection techniques have been proposed, most of them can only address part of the practical difficulties. An oscillation is heuristically defined as a visually apparent periodic variation. However, manual visual inspection is labor-intensive and prone to missed detection. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), inspired by animal visual systems, have been raised with powerful feature extraction capabilities. In this work, an exploration of the typical CNN models for visual oscillation detection is performed. Specifically, we tested MobileNet-V1, ShuffleNet-V2, EfficientNet-B0, and GhostNet models, and found that such a visual framework is well-suited for oscillation detection. The feasibility and validity of this framework are verified utilizing extensive numerical and industrial cases. Compared with state-of-the-art oscillation detectors, the suggested framework is more straightforward and more robust to noise and mean-nonstationarity. In addition, this framework generalizes well and is capable of handling features that are not present in the training data, such as multiple oscillations and outliers.