Illegal pipeline tap detection has recently gained a lot of importance due to safety and obvious economic reasons. Techniques to achieve this at a low total operating cost and with a fast response time are necessary to perform monitoring and take the necessary counter measures.

This paper presents one such technique with an extra high resolution and low cost inline inspection tool that can be easily operated by local staff without specific training. This enables a high frequency of utilization in the same pipeline in order to monitor for new threats.

The reports can be delivered in a few hours by using state of the art machine learning and cloud computing techniques.

Field results are also shown to illustrate the achieved resolution as well as the performance on different configurations of illegal tapping.