Convolutional neural networks and Internet of Things for fault detection by aerial monitoring of photovoltaic solar plants

Abstract

Aerial thermographic inspection is performed with thermal cameras embedded in unmanned aerial vehicles, being one of the most relevant monitoring techniques for photovoltaic panels. This technique allows the detection of thermal patterns associated with faults in the photovoltaic panels, although image analysis and fault detection require novel processing methodologies. The volume and variety of aerial thermal data together with the need for faster and more efficient analysis for early maintenance operations require efficient Internet of Things architectures to provide fast and effective diagnostics with easy access.This paper presents a new approach based on image analysis with two consecutive convolutional neural networks to detect hot spots in an Internet of Things platform and reduce the number of false positives. The architecture of the platform is designed to automatically process the received data through the implementation of different Convolutional Neural Networks. A real case study is proposed with thermograms from three photovoltaic solar plants with different sizes, shapes of panels and a wide temperature range. The results show an accuracy of 99 % for panel detection and 96 % for hot spot detection with a reduction of false positives compared to other studies, such as Support Vector Machine or different Artificial Neural Networks, demonstrating the robustness of the method.