Real-Time UAV-Based Oil Pipeline and Visual Anomaly Detection Using YOLOv26n: A Dataset and Edge-Deployment Study

Ensuring the structural integrity and operational safety of oil and gas pipelines is a critical challenge due to their extensive geographical coverage and exposure to environmental and anthropogenic risks. Traditional inspection approaches including ground patrols and manned aerial surveys are labor-intensive, costly, and often lack real-time responsiveness. While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) enable flexible and high-resolution monitoring, their practical deployment requires lightweight, robust detection models capable of real-time inference on embedded edge hardware under heterogeneous environmental conditions. This paper presents an end-to-end, edge-deployable UAV inspection framework for simultaneous detection of above-ground pipelines and visually observable anomaly/leak indicators using the official Ultralytics YOLOv26n object detector. A curated dataset of 6127 UAV images acquired across desert, semi-urban, and industrial environments was annotated with two classes (Pipeline and Anomaly/Leak) and partitioned into training 87.5%, validation 8.3%, and testing 4.2% subsets. The detector was fine-tuned from COCO-pretrained weights for 300 epochs at 600 × 600 resolution and evaluated using COCO-style metrics. On the held-out test set, the proposed model achieved 92.4% mAP@0.5 and 75.0% mAP@0.5:0.95, with 89.7% precision, 90.2% recall, and 89.9% F1-score at the selected operating threshold. Optimized TensorRT deployment on an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX sustained real-time inference at 18 FPS, demonstrating suitability for onboard UAV processing. Rather than proposing a new detector architecture, the study contributes a domain-specific annotated UAV dataset, deployment-oriented benchmarking, and an end-to-end edge inference workflow for corridor-scale monitoring. The proposed framework can help reduce environmental contamination risk and improve personnel safety during pipeline inspection.