Physics-Inspired Modeling and Content Adaptive Routing in an Infrared Gas Leak Detection Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces a physics-inspired, adaptive routing network for infrared gas leak detection that enhances boundary detection and reduces redundancy, achieving high accuracy with efficient computation.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel hybrid network architecture with specialized modules for modeling gas transport, edge detection, and adaptive feature routing, improving detection of faint gas plumes.

Findings

Achieves 29.8% AP on IIG dataset, surpassing baseline by 3.0%.

Reaches 84.3% AP50, outperforming existing detectors.

Requires only 43.7 Gflops and 14.9 M parameters, demonstrating efficiency.

Abstract

Detecting infrared gas leaks is critical for environmental monitoring and industrial safety, yet remains difficult because plumes are faint, small, semitransparent, and have weak, diffuse boundaries. We present physics-edge hybrid gas dynamic routing network (PEG-DRNet). First, we introduce the Gas Block, a diffusion-convection unit modeling gas transport: a local branch captures short-range variations, while a large-kernel branch captures long-range propagation. An edge-gated learnable fusion module balances local detail and global context, strengthening weak-contrast plume and contour cues. Second, we propose the adaptive gradient and phase edge operator (AGPEO), computing reliable edge priors from multi-directional gradients and phase-consistent responses. These are transformed by a multi-scale edge perception module (MSEPM) into hierarchical edge features that reinforce boundaries. Finally, the content-adaptive sparse routing path aggregation network (CASR-PAN), with adaptive information modulation modules for fusion and self, selectively propagates informative features across scales based on edge and content cues, improving cross-scale discriminability while reducing redundancy. Experiments on the IIG dataset show that PEG-DRNet achieves an overall AP of 29.8\%, an AP$_{50}$ of 84.3\%, and a small-object AP of 25.3\%, surpassing the RT-DETR-R18 baseline by 3.0\%, 6.5\%, and 5.3\%, respectively, while requiring only 43.7 Gflops and 14.9 M parameters. The proposed PEG-DRNet achieves superior overall performance with the best balance of accuracy and computational efficiency, outperforming existing CNN and Transformer detectors in AP and AP$_{50}$ on the IIG and LangGas dataset.