PV-YOLO: Lightweight YOLO for Photovoltaic Panel Fault Detection

The rapid development of the photovoltaic industry in recent years has made the efficient and accurate completion of photovoltaic operation and maintenance a major focus in recent studies. The key to photovoltaic operation and maintenance is the accurate multifault identification of photovoltaic panel images collected using drones. In this paper, PV-YOLO is proposed to replace YOLOX’s backbone network, CSPDarknet53, with a transformer-based PVTv2 network to obtain local connections between images and feature maps to extract more edge-detail features of similar faults. The CBAM attention mechanism is added to enhance the effective features and improve the detection accuracy of small objects. The label assignment mechanism is optimized, and the SIoU loss functionis used to improve the uneven distribution of samples and accelerate network convergence. Experiments on the dataset prove that this method is superior to the existing technology, as the highest mAP value is 92.56%. This value is 10.46% higher than that of YOLOX, and the mAP is optimal under the same parameter magnitude,proving the model’s effectiveness.Moreover, mAP is increased by over 10%, especially for small targets. In this paper, we implemented a lightweight design for the model, and proposes four models of different sizes to be-sized models that are suitable for different detection scenarios.