Enhancing Defect Classification in Solar Panels With Electroluminescence Imaging and Advanced Machine Learning Strategies

Electroluminescence (EL) imaging is the most widely used diagnostic technique for identifying flaws at every stage of the production, installation, and operation of solar modules. This method can potentially reduce power outages by locating and fixing solar module faults such microcracks and breaks...

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Main Author: Fatih Demir
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2025-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10928332/
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author Fatih Demir
author_facet Fatih Demir
author_sort Fatih Demir
collection DOAJ
description Electroluminescence (EL) imaging is the most widely used diagnostic technique for identifying flaws at every stage of the production, installation, and operation of solar modules. This method can potentially reduce power outages by locating and fixing solar module faults such microcracks and breaks in the finger lines. The EL test is a reliable inspection method, however, because of complex fault patterns and heterogeneous backgrounds, interpreting EL images can be difficult. As a result, assessing damaged cells and determining the severity of an issue necessitates specialized knowledge, which makes manually executing these methods for each cell time-consuming. Because of this, automated visual inspection of solar cells becomes very important. In this work, a novel system for automatically identifying and categorizing solar cell faults is presented. A strong CNN model created from scratch is used to extract deep features. Utilizing the recently developed RSWS classification method, the deep characteristics are evaluated. The popular ELPV dataset with two and four classes is used to test the suggested methodology. For the two-class classification problem, the classification performance is 98.17%, and for the four-class classification problem, it is 97.02%.
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spelling doaj-art-dcd34e5b40e449dcbbccb20c87fb3e7a2025-08-20T01:54:34ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362025-01-0113584815849510.1109/ACCESS.2025.355174910928332Enhancing Defect Classification in Solar Panels With Electroluminescence Imaging and Advanced Machine Learning StrategiesFatih Demir0https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3210-3664Software Department, Engineering Faculty, Fırat University, Elâzığ, TürkiyeElectroluminescence (EL) imaging is the most widely used diagnostic technique for identifying flaws at every stage of the production, installation, and operation of solar modules. This method can potentially reduce power outages by locating and fixing solar module faults such microcracks and breaks in the finger lines. The EL test is a reliable inspection method, however, because of complex fault patterns and heterogeneous backgrounds, interpreting EL images can be difficult. As a result, assessing damaged cells and determining the severity of an issue necessitates specialized knowledge, which makes manually executing these methods for each cell time-consuming. Because of this, automated visual inspection of solar cells becomes very important. In this work, a novel system for automatically identifying and categorizing solar cell faults is presented. A strong CNN model created from scratch is used to extract deep features. Utilizing the recently developed RSWS classification method, the deep characteristics are evaluated. The popular ELPV dataset with two and four classes is used to test the suggested methodology. For the two-class classification problem, the classification performance is 98.17%, and for the four-class classification problem, it is 97.02%.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10928332/Solar modulesdefectsEL imagingmachine learningclassification
spellingShingle Fatih Demir
Enhancing Defect Classification in Solar Panels With Electroluminescence Imaging and Advanced Machine Learning Strategies
IEEE Access
Solar modules
defects
EL imaging
machine learning
classification
title Enhancing Defect Classification in Solar Panels With Electroluminescence Imaging and Advanced Machine Learning Strategies
title_full Enhancing Defect Classification in Solar Panels With Electroluminescence Imaging and Advanced Machine Learning Strategies
title_fullStr Enhancing Defect Classification in Solar Panels With Electroluminescence Imaging and Advanced Machine Learning Strategies
title_full_unstemmed Enhancing Defect Classification in Solar Panels With Electroluminescence Imaging and Advanced Machine Learning Strategies
title_short Enhancing Defect Classification in Solar Panels With Electroluminescence Imaging and Advanced Machine Learning Strategies
title_sort enhancing defect classification in solar panels with electroluminescence imaging and advanced machine learning strategies
topic Solar modules
defects
EL imaging
machine learning
classification
url https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10928332/
work_keys_str_mv AT fatihdemir enhancingdefectclassificationinsolarpanelswithelectroluminescenceimagingandadvancedmachinelearningstrategies