Unified Deep Learning Platform for Dust and Fault Diagnosis in Solar Panels Using Thermal and Visual Imaging
Abishek Karthik, Sreya Mynampati, Pandiyaraju V
TL;DR
This work tackles maintaining solar photovoltaic systems by jointly detecting dust/soiling and faults through a unified platform that fuses thermal and RGB imaging. It introduces a KerNet-augmented ResNet classifier with gamma removal and Gaussian filtering in preprocessing to achieve robust dust and fault detection. Two datasets totaling 2654 images are used to evaluate the method, showing superior performance over baselines in terms of metrics like F1-score and accuracy. The centralized, scalable framework enables proactive maintenance from residential rooftops to large solar farms, potentially improving energy efficiency and reducing downtime.
Abstract
Solar energy is one of the most abundant and tapped sources of renewable energies with enormous future potential. Solar panel output can vary widely with factors like intensity, temperature, dirt, debris and so on affecting it. We have implemented a model on detecting dust and fault on solar panels. These two applications are centralized as a single-platform and can be utilized for routine-maintenance and any other checks. These are checked against various parameters such as power output, sinusoidal wave (I-V component of solar cell), voltage across each solar cell and others. Firstly, we filter and preprocess the obtained images using gamma removal and Gaussian filtering methods alongside some predefined processes like normalization. The first application is to detect whether a solar cell is dusty or not based on various pre-determined metrics like shadowing, leaf, droppings, air pollution and from other human activities to extent of fine-granular solar modules. The other one is detecting faults and other such occurrences on solar panels like faults, cracks, cell malfunction using thermal imaging application. This centralized platform can be vital since solar panels have different efficiency across different geography (air and heat affect) and can also be utilized for small-scale house requirements to large-scale solar farm sustentation effectively. It incorporates CNN, ResNet models that with self-attention mechanisms-KerNet model which are used for classification and results in a fine-tuned system that detects dust or any fault occurring. Thus, this multi-application model proves to be efficient and optimized in detecting dust and faults on solar panels. We have performed various comparisons and findings that demonstrates that our model has better efficiency and accuracy results overall than existing models.