When using drones to capture infrared images of photovoltaic modules for detection
the images often exhibit complex backgrounds
leading to challenges in detecting small target hot spots
which may result in information loss
false positives
or false negatives. In response to these issues
a novel fusion network(HCF-YOLO) is proposed by integrating the HCF-Net with the YOLOv8n network for detecting hot spot faults in infrared images of photovoltaic modules. This fusion network incorporates a Parallelized Patch-Aware Attention Module(PPA) to enhance the representation of small targets through hierarchical feature fusion and attention mechanisms
ensuring the retention of crucial hot spot information after multiple downsampling steps. Additionally
a Dimension-Aware Selective Integration Module(DASI) is employed to adaptively select and finely integrate high-dimensional and low-dimensional features
thereby enhancing the saliency of small targets. The Powerful IoU(PIOU) is adopted as the loss function for HCF-YOLO
guiding the early-stage regression of predicted boxes along effective paths to improve detection speed. The HCF-YOLO algorithm demonstrates a significant enhancement in detection accuracy
with the average precision at an intersection over union of 50%(AP50) increasing from 89.27% to 97.28% compared to the original YOLOv8n algorithm
achieving a detection speed of 217.33 frame/s. According to the experimental results
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