Work

Deep Edge-Based Fault Detection for Solar Panels

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: Solar panels may suffer from faults, which could yield high temperature and significantly degrade their power generation. To detect faults of solar panels in large photovoltaic plants, drones with infrared cameras have been implemented. Drones may capture a huge number of infrared images. It is not realistic to manually analyze such a huge number of infrared images. To solve this problem, we develop a Deep Edge-Based Fault Detection (DEBFD) method, which applies convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for edge detection and object detection according to the captured infrared images. Particularly, a machine learning-based contour filter is designed to eliminate incorrect background contours. Then faults of solar panels are detected. Based on these fault detection results, solar panels can be classified into two classes, i.e., normal and faulty ones (i.e., macro ones). We collected 2060 images in multiple scenes and achieved a high macro F1 score. Our method achieved a frame rate of 28 fps over infrared images of solar panels on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPU.

Source: Sensors

DOI: 10.3390/s24165348

Authors: Haoyu Ling, Manlu Liu, Yi Fang

Institutions: Southwest University of Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China

Language: English

Topic: Industrial Vision Systems and Defect Detection

Subfield: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDGs: Affordable and clean energy, Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,955