Title
Edge-Computing-Enabled Unmanned Module Defect Detection and Diagnosis System for Large-Scale Photovoltaic Plants
Abstract
The power efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) modules is highly correlated with their health status. Under dynamically changing environments, PV defects could spontaneously form and develop into fatal faults during the daily operation of PV power plants. To facilitate defect detection with less human intervention, a nondestructive, contactless, and automatical visual inspection system with the help of unmanned aerial vehicles and edge computing is proposed in this article. During the processing of the incoming data stream, the system may collect some new, unknown, and unlabeled defects that have not been identified yet in the existing database. To distinguish them from the existing ones, a deep embedded restricted cluster algorithm is designed to identify the unknown and unlabeled PV module defects in an unsupervised manner. Limited by the resources of edge devices and the availability of images of PV defects for training, we developed an online solution combined with deep learning, data argumentation, and transfer learning to properly address the issues of running resource-hungry applications on edge devices and lack of training samples faced by the deep learning approaches used in the field. In addition, pointwise convolution layers are introduced into the network to reduce the parameters and the size of the model. With the reduction of the network depth of the deep convolutional neural network model and the features transferred from the learned defects, the resource consumption of our proposed approach is significantly reduced, and thus can be used on a wide range of edge devices to complete defect detection in a timely manner with high accuracy. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/JIOT.2020.2983723
IEEE Internet of Things Journal
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Image edge detection,Inspection,Photovoltaic systems,Training,Edge computing,Clustering algorithms
Journal
7
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
10
2327-4662
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xiaoxia Li100.68
Wei Li222725.46
Qiang Yang32510.46
W. J. Yan413.43
albert y zomaya542743.75