A PV cell defect detector combined with transformer and attention mechanism

Abstract Automated defect detection in electroluminescence (EL) images of photovoltaic (PV) modules on production lines remains a significant challenge, crucial for replacing labor-intensive and costly manual inspections and enhancing production capacity. This paper presents a novel PV defect detection algorithm that leverages the YOLO architecture, integrating an attention mechanism and the Transformer module. We introduce a polarized self-attention mechanism in the feature extraction stage, enabling separate extraction of spatial and semantic features of PV modules, combined with the original input features, to enhance the network’s feature representation capabilities. Subsequently, we integrate the proposed CNN Combined Transformer (CCT) module into the model. The CCT module employs the transformer to extract contextual semantic information more effectively, improving detection accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a 77.9% mAP50 on the PVEL-AD dataset while preserving real-time detection capabilities. This method enhances the mAP50 by 17.2% compared to the baseline, and the mAP50:95 metric exhibits an 8.4% increase over the baseline.