A novel object recognition method for photovoltaic (PV) panel occlusion based on deep learning

During the long-term operation of the photovoltaic (PV) system, occlusion will reduce the solar radiation energy received by the PV module, as well as the photoelectric conversion efficiency and economy. However, the occlusion detection of the PV power station has the defects of low efficiency, poor accuracy, and untimely detection, which will cause unknown system losses. Based on the deep learning algorithm, this paper conducts research on PV module occlusion detection. In order to accurately obtain the occlusion area and position information of the PV panel, a PV module occlusion detection model based on the Segment-You Only Look Once (Seg-YOLO) algorithm is established. Based on the YOLOv5 algorithm, the loss function is modified, the Segment Head detection module is introduced, and the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) attention mechanism is added to achieve the accurate detection of small targets by the algorithm model and the fast detection of the PV module occlusion area identify. The model performance research is carried out on three types of occlusion datasets: leaf, bird dropping, and shadow. According to the experimental results, the proposed model has better recognition accuracy and speed than SSD, Faster-Rcnn, YOLOv4, and U-Net. The precision rate, recall rate, and recognition speed can reach 90.52%, 92.41%, and 92.3 FPS, respectively. This model can lay a theoretical foundation for the intelligent operation and maintenance of PV systems.