Solar panel monitoring: real-time system using video watermarking and Mosaicing

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new approach to monitor a solar plant in real-time using an embedded vision system, comprised mainly of raspberry Pi3 card, GPS and thermometer sensors, and an HD camera module. This approach consists on using image processing techniques on solar energy fields. It is implemented on two steps, the first apply the digital watermarking technique based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) to indexing a captured video. We start by capturing all information from the solar plant (GPS coordinates, temperature, date, and time), then we embed on each video frame their related data. This method depends on transforming the video frames from the spatial to the frequency domain using DCT and embedding data in 8 × 8 block coefficients. The second step consists on applying a mosaicing techniques based on the scale invariant features transform (SIFT), in order to generate a panoramic image of the solar plant from video frames. Remotely, the supervisor can visualize the image of the whole, part, or panel of the solar plant, and exploits the embedded data to ensure an efficient real-time monitoring. The proposed method allows a high efficiency in terms of accuracy, data security, and retrieving data quickly, also it offers a high capacity, less imperceptibility and good robustness.