Lightweight Transformer-Driven Segmentation of Hotspots and Snail Trails in Solar PV Thermal Imagery

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Joshi, Deepak, Pal, Mayukha
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Joshi, Deepak
Pal, Mayukha
author_facet Joshi, Deepak
Pal, Mayukha
contents Accurate detection of defects such as hotspots and snail trails in photovoltaic modules is essential for maintaining energy efficiency and system reliablility. This work presents a supervised deep learning framework for segmenting thermal infrared images of PV panels, using a dataset of 277 aerial thermographic images captured by zenmuse XT infrared camera mounted on a DJI Matrice 100 drone. The preprocessing pipeline includes image resizing, CLAHE based contrast enhancement, denoising, and normalisation. A lightweight semantic segmentation model based on SegFormer is developed, featuring a customised Transformwer encoder and streamlined decoder, and fine-tuned on annotated images with manually labeled defect regions. To evaluate performance, we benchmark our model against U-Net, DeepLabV3, PSPNet, and Mask2Former using consistent preprocessing and augmentation. Evaluation metrices includes per-class Dice score, F1-score, Cohen's kappa, mean IoU, and pixel accuracy. The SegFormer-based model outperforms baselines in accuracy and efficiency, particularly for segmenting small and irregular defects. Its lightweight design real-time deployment on edge devices and seamless integration with drone-based systems for automated inspection of large-scale solar farms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_20680
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lightweight Transformer-Driven Segmentation of Hotspots and Snail Trails in Solar PV Thermal Imagery
Joshi, Deepak
Pal, Mayukha
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Accurate detection of defects such as hotspots and snail trails in photovoltaic modules is essential for maintaining energy efficiency and system reliablility. This work presents a supervised deep learning framework for segmenting thermal infrared images of PV panels, using a dataset of 277 aerial thermographic images captured by zenmuse XT infrared camera mounted on a DJI Matrice 100 drone. The preprocessing pipeline includes image resizing, CLAHE based contrast enhancement, denoising, and normalisation. A lightweight semantic segmentation model based on SegFormer is developed, featuring a customised Transformwer encoder and streamlined decoder, and fine-tuned on annotated images with manually labeled defect regions. To evaluate performance, we benchmark our model against U-Net, DeepLabV3, PSPNet, and Mask2Former using consistent preprocessing and augmentation. Evaluation metrices includes per-class Dice score, F1-score, Cohen's kappa, mean IoU, and pixel accuracy. The SegFormer-based model outperforms baselines in accuracy and efficiency, particularly for segmenting small and irregular defects. Its lightweight design real-time deployment on edge devices and seamless integration with drone-based systems for automated inspection of large-scale solar farms.
title Lightweight Transformer-Driven Segmentation of Hotspots and Snail Trails in Solar PV Thermal Imagery
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20680