Rejection of seamless pipe noise in magnetic flux leakage data obtained from gas pipeline inspection

Natural gas is traditionally transmitted from production facilities to customer locations through a vast pipeline network. A major segment of this network employs seamless pipes. This is especially true for smaller diameter transmission and distribution lines. Manufacturing process associated with the production of seamless pipes contribute to a helical variation in the pipe along the axis. The deformation introduces an artifact in the data obtained from MFL inspection of these pipelines. This seamless pipe noise is usually correlated with signals generated by defects and other elements (joints, tees, etc.) in pipelines, and can therefore, mask their indications in MFL data. This warrants the need for methods to improve signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in MFL data from seamless pipes. This paper presents a technique for detecting signals in MFL data from seamless pipes. The approach processes the data in various steps. First, a wavelet based denoising technique is applied to reduce the noise due to instrumenta...