Abstract
Infrared thermography is the science of measuring the infrared energy emitted by an object, translating it to apparent temperature variance, and displaying the result as an infrared image. Significantly, acquiring thermal images delivers distinctive levels of temperature differences in solar panels that correspond to their health status, which is beneficial for the early detection of defects. The proposed algorithm aims to analyze the thermal solar panel images. The acquired thermal solar panel images were segmented into solar cell sizes to provide more detailed information by region or cell area instead of the entire solar panel. This paper uses both the image histogram information and its corresponding cumulative distribution function (CDF), useful for image analysis. The acquired thermal solar panel images are enhanced using grayscale, histogram equalization, and adaptive histogram equalization to represent a domain that is easier to analyze. The experimental results reveal that the extraction results of thermal images provide better histogram and CDF features. Furthermore, the proposed scheme includes the convolutional neural network (CNN) for classifying the enhanced images, which shows that a 97% accuracy of classification was achieved. The proposed scheme could promote different thermal image applications—for example, non-physical visual recognition and fault detection analysis.
Highlights
Renewable energy aims to be a reliable power supply, offering fuel diversification, maintaining energy security, minimizing the risk of fuel spills, and lowering the demand for imported fuels
This paper presents an algorithm for thermal imaging technology that extracts the features of thermal images— for solar panel applications—to simplify the representation into an easier domain for analysis
Aside from the histogram of an image, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) provides significant insight as one of the parameters when dealing with image processing
Summary
Renewable energy aims to be a reliable power supply, offering fuel diversification, maintaining energy security, minimizing the risk of fuel spills, and lowering the demand for imported fuels. As a renewable energy source, solar energy produces solar power, converted into electricity—i.e., solar cells, called photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight into electricity [4,5,6]. Heat (i.e., infrared) is emitted from the PV panels during power conversion This heat dissipation process and the heat emitted by an object, or a person can be captured and recorded using a thermal camera [12,13]—the use of which is increasing in different monitoring applications in fields such as engineering [14,15], structural systems [16,17], security [18,19], and medical fields [20,21].
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