SolarFCD: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Solar Fault Classification in Photovoltaic Systems

The increasing global deployment of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems needs robust, scalable, and automated inspection technologies capable of detecting a wide range of panel flaws under a variety of operating situations. The lack of large-scale, multi-modal, publicly available annotated datasets is a major obstacle preventing advancement in this field. We introduce SolarFCD, an extensive dataset of solar panel defects created by methodically combining and reconciling three publicly accessible datasets covering two imaging modalities: RGB/Drone images and Thermal Infrared. The dataset consist of 4,435 images arranged under four unified defect classes such as: healthy images, Surface Obstruction, structural fault, and electrical fault. The dataset was divided into training, validation, and test splits at an 80:10:10 ratio through methodical label mapping, near-duplicate removal, and targeted augmentation of minority classes. Sixteen classification architectures from five design families were trained and assessed on the dataset to provide repeatable benchmark baselines. With an accuracy of 86.68%, precision of 88.65%, recall of 88.62%, and F1-score of 88.17%, ResNet101V2 performed the best overall. Per-class results showed balanced detection across all four defect categories within a narrow performance band of less than 1.2 percentage points. To promote open and repeatable research in automated PV inspection and solar energy operations and maintenance, the dataset, annotation files, and baseline code are made openly available.

MS-SSE-Net: A Multi-Scale Spatial Squeeze-and-Excitation Network for Structural Damage Detection in Civil and Geotechnical Engineering

Structural damage detection is essential for maintaining the safety and reliability of civil infrastructure. However, accurately identifying different types of structural damage from images remains challenging due to variations in damage patterns and environmental conditions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes MS-SSE-Net, a novel deep learning (DL) framework for structural damage classification. The proposed model is built upon the DenseNet201 backbone and integrates novel multi-scale feature extraction with channel and spatial attention mechanisms (MS-SSE-Net). Specifically, parallel depthwise convolutions capture both local and contextual features, while squeeze-and-excitation style channel attention and spatial attention emphasize informative regions and suppress irrelevant noise. The refined features are then processed through global average pooling and a fully connected classification layer to generate the final predictions. Experiments are conducted on the StructDamage dataset containing multiple structural damage categories. The proposed MS-SSE-Net demonstrates superior performance compared with the baseline DenseNet201 and other comparative approaches. Specifically, the proposed method achieves 99.31% precision, 99.25% recall, 99.27% F1-score, and 99.26% accuracy, outperforming the baseline model which achieved 98.62% precision, 98.53% recall, 98.58% F1-score, and 98.53% accuracy.