Classification of Hotspots in Photovoltaic Modules with Deep Learning Methods

Solar energy systems are increasing their capacity in the energy industry day by day by operating with higher efficiency in parallel with technological developments. The functional operation of photovoltaic (PV) module contributes greatly to the optimal performance of these systems. On the other hand, detection and classification of faults occurring in PV modules are of vital importance in the operation and maintenance of solar energy systems. In this study, the classification of hotspots, which is one of the most common faults in Photovoltaic (PV) modules, is carried out by deep learning methods. First, data augmentation is applied to the images in the training dataset to improve the classification performance. Then, pre-trained deep learning models namely AlexNet, GoogLeNet, ShuffleNet, SqueezeNet, ResNet-50, and MobileNet-v2 are compared on the same test dataset. According to the obtained experimental results, AlexNet has the best performance with an accuracy value of 98.65%, while ResNet-50 provides the worst result with 94.59%.