A Deep Learning-Based Surface Defects Detection and Color Classification Method for Solar Cells

In recent years, solar photovoltaic-based power generation technology has become the key planning direction of many countries around the world. In the process of making solar cells, the quality inspection requirements are very particular, such as physical damages, surface scratches, broken grids and microcracks. In traditional factory production, the detection of the above defects requires professional inspectors to carry out visual inspection, which often leads to low detection efficiency, subjective assumption and fatigue, as well as some detection errors. In recent years, the rapid development of computer vision makes it possible to be used to detect the defects in solar cells. To overcome existing barriers, this paper proposes a method for detecting surface defects in solar cells based on deep neural network. Specifically, a specified image segmentation model named U-Net is developed for this purpose. By automatically segmenting little objects using the proposed recognition approach, surface defects detection can be realized. At last, we use a set of experiments on images from real scenes to verify the proposed method.