A Multi-Stage model based on YOLOv3 for defect detection in PV panels based on IR and Visible Imaging by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

As solar capacity installed worldwide continues to grow, there is an increasing awareness that advanced inspection systems are becoming of utmost importance to schedule smart interventions and minimize downtime likelihood. In this work we propose a novel automatic multi-stage model to detect panel defects on aerial images captured by unmanned aerial vehicle by using the YOLOv3 network and Computer Vision techniques. The model combines detections of panels and defects to refine its accuracy. The main novelties are represented by its versatility to process either thermographic or visible images and detect a large variety of defects and its portability to both rooftop and ground-mounted PV systems and different panel types. The proposed model has been validated on two big PV plants in the south of Italy with an outstanding AP@0.5 exceeding 98% for panel detection, a remarkable AP@0.4 (AP@0.5) of roughly 88.3% (66.95%) for hotspots by means of infrared thermography and a mAP@0.5 of almost 70% in the visible spectrum for detection of anomalies including panel shading induced by soiling and bird dropping, delamination, presence of puddles and raised rooftop panels. An estimation of the soiling coverage is also predicted. Finally an analysis of the influence of the different YOLOv3's output scales on the detection is discussed.

Real-Time target detection in maritime scenarios based on YOLOv3 model

In this work a novel ships dataset is proposed consisting of more than 56k images of marine vessels collected by means of web-scraping and including 12 ship categories. A YOLOv3 single-stage detector based on Keras API is built on top of this dataset. Current results on four categories (cargo ship, naval ship, oil ship and tug ship) show Average Precision up to 96% for Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.5 and satisfactory detection performances up to IoU of 0.8. A Data Analytics GUI service based on QT framework and Darknet-53 engine is also implemented in order to simplify the deployment process and analyse massive amount of images even for people without Data Science expertise.