Enhanced solar panels fault detection approach using lightweight YOLO

Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven fault detection improves the reliability of solar energy by reducing the chances of system failures. However, existing single-stage object detection methods excel in accuracy but demand high computational resources, preventing seamless integration into embedded systems. This paper introduces a lightweight approach using YOLOv5, which incorporates a multi-backbone design, specifically tailored for accurate fault detection in solar cells. It evaluates YOLOv5 and TinyYOLOv5. The findings emphasize the effectiveness of YOLOv5l with Ghost backbone, particularly notable for its precision rates of 96% for faulty and 93% for non-faulty instances. Additionally, it showcases commendable mean average precision (mAP) scores, achieving 78% at an intersection over union (IoU) threshold of 0.5 and 72% at an IoU of 0.95. Additionally, YOLOv5_Ghost emerges as the optimal selection, showcasing competitive precision, processing speed of 42.1 giga floating point operations per second (GFLOPS), and remarkable efficiency with 2.4 million parameters. This evaluation underscores the effectiveness of YOLOv5 models, thereby leading to advanced solar energy technology significantly.