Progress in Photovoltaics publishes Lukas Bommes' article
Progress in Photovoltaics publishes Lukas Bommes' article on the classification of more than 100.000 PV-Modules with IR-Thermography and Machine Learning - Fault classification in more than 100.000 PV-Modules from aerial IR-videos
Increasing deployment of photovoltaics (PV) plants demands for cheap and fast inspection. A viable tool for this task is thermographic imaging by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). In this work, we develop a computer vision tool for the semiautomatic extraction of PV modules from thermographic UAV videos. We use it to curate a dataset containing 4.3 million IR images of 107,842 PV modules from thermographic videos of seven different PV plants. To demonstrate its use for automated PV plant inspection, we train a ResNet-50 to classify ten common module anomalies with more than 90% test accuracy. Experiments show that our tool generalizes well to different PV plants. It successfully extracts PV modules from 512 out of 561 plant rows. Failures are mostly due to an inappropriate UAV trajectory and erroneous module segmentation. Including all manual steps our tool enables inspection of 3.5 MWp to 9 MWp of PV installations per day, potentially scaling to multi-gigawatt plants due to its parallel nature. While we present an effective method for automated PV plant inspection, we are also confident that our approach helps to meet the growing demand for large thermographic datasets for machine learning tasks, such as power prediction or unsupervised defect identification.
Read all the details in our new article "Computer vision tool for detection, mapping, and fault classification of photovoltaics modules in aerial IR videos", published in Progress in Photovoltaics.
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Dr. Jens Hauch
Abteilungsleiter Teamleiter "High Throughput Materials and Devices"
Room 1.12
Dr. Ian Marius Peters
Gruppenleiter "Hochdurchsatz Charakterisierung und Modellierung für die PV"
Room 2.3