Deep learning based defect detection algorithm for solar panels

Defect detection of solar panels plays an essential role in guaranteeing product quality within automated production lines. However, traditional manual inspection of solar panel defects suffers from low efficiency. This paper proposes an enhanced YOLOv5 algorithm (EL-YOLOv5) fused with the CBAM hybrid attention module to ensure product quality. The algorithm focuses on detecting five common types of defects that frequently appear on photovoltaic production lines, namely hidden cracks, scratches, broken grids, black spots, and short circuits. This study utilizes publicly available solar panel datasets, as well as datasets collected from actual photovoltaic production lines. These datasets are annotated accordingly and used to train the proposed algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves good performance on both the public and actual solar panel defect datasets. Particularly in actual datasets, where defect features are often less apparent and defects are smaller in size, the proposed algorithm can still detect even minor black spots.