Gas leaks can cause major incidents resulting in both human injuries and financial losses. To avoid such situations, a considerable amount of effort has been devoted to the development of reliable techniques for detecting gas leakage. As knowing about the existence of a leak is not always enough to launch a corrective action, some of the leak detection techniques were designed to allow the possibility of locating the leak. The main purpose of this paper is to identify the state-of-the-art in leak detection and localization methods. Additionally we evaluate the capabilities of these techniques in order to identify the advantages and disadvantages of using each leak detection solution. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.