To address the limitations of accuracy and comprehensiveness in single-image defect detection for photovoltaic modules
a multi-source image fusion method is proposed for detecting defects in photovoltaic modules. Firstly
the Cross-Modulation is embedded in the encoder of the image fusion network. Feature alignment is used instead of image registration to reveal the correspondence between the features of visible light and infrared images of photovoltaic modules
enabling the fusion of unregistered images. Secondly
the Skip Mechanism is adopted to selectively apply the attention mechanism
accelerating image processing and reducing resource consumption. Finally
the fused images are utilized for detection using the YOLO series defect detection networks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed multi-source image fusion method effectively overcomes the limitations of single-image defect detection
resulting in an average precision improvement of 5.6% across multiple networks.
CHIRIAC G, NITUCA C, CUCIUREANU D, et al.Analysis of hot-spots effects on the performances of a photovoltaic system used in Romania[C]//2017 International Conference on Electromechanical and Power Systems (SIELMEN). Iasi, Romania, 2017: 239-244.
TANG W Q, YANG Q, DAI Z, et al.Module defect detection and diagnosis for intelligent maintenance of solar photovoltaic plants: techniques, systems and perspectives[J]. Energy, 2024, 297: 131222.
APPIAH A Y, ZHANG X H, AYAWLI B B K, et al. Review and performance evaluation of photovoltaic array fault detection and diagnosis techniques[J]. International journal of photoenergy, 2019, 2019(1): 6953530.
KÖNTGES M, KURTZ S, PACKARD CE, et al. Review of failures of photovoltaic modules[R].IEA-PVPS T13-01:2014.
LI X X, LI W, YANG Q, et al.Edge-computing-enabled unmanned module defect detection and diagnosis system for large-scale photovoltaic plants[J]. IEEE internet of things journal, 2020, 7(10): 9651-9663.
RICO ESPINOSA A, BRESSAN M, GIRALDO L F.Failure signature classification in solar photovoltaic plants using RGB images and convolutional neural networks[J]. Renewable energy, 2020, 162: 249-256.
NAVEEN VENKATESH S, REBECCA JEYAVADHANAM B, MORADI SIZKOUHI A M, et al. Automatic detection of visual faults on photovoltaic modules using deep ensemble learning network[J]. Energy reports, 2022, 8: 14382-14395.
HONG F, SONG J, MENG H, et al.A novel framework on intelligent detection for module defects of PV plant combining the visible and infrared images[J]. Solar energy, 2022, 236: 406-416.
JEFFREY KUO C F, CHEN S H, HUANG C Y. Automatic detection, classification and localization of defects inlargephotovoltaic plants using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) based infrared (IR) and RGB imaging[J]. Energy conversion and management, 2023, 276: 116495.
LI H F, ZHAO J Z, LI J X, et al.Feature dynamic alignment and refinement for infrared-visible image fusion: translation robust fusion[J]. Information fusion, 2023, 95: 26-41.
VENKATARAMANAN S, GHODRATI A, ASANO Y M, et al. Skip-attention: improving vision transformers by paying less attention[J]. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301. 02240, 2023.