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Article
Publication date: 15 April 2020

Xiaoliang Qian, Jing Li, Jianwei Zhang, Wenhao Zhang, Weichao Yue, Qing-E Wu, Huanlong Zhang, Yuanyuan Wu and Wei Wang

An effective machine vision-based method for micro-crack detection of solar cell can economically improve the qualified rate of solar cells. However, how to extract features which…

Abstract

Purpose

An effective machine vision-based method for micro-crack detection of solar cell can economically improve the qualified rate of solar cells. However, how to extract features which have strong generalization and data representation ability at the same time is still an open problem for machine vision-based methods.

Design/methodology/approach

A micro-crack detection method based on adaptive deep features and visual saliency is proposed in this paper. The proposed method can adaptively extract deep features from the input image without any supervised training. Furthermore, considering the fact that micro-cracks can obviously attract visual attention when people look at the solar cell’s surface, the visual saliency is also introduced for the micro-crack detection.

Findings

Comprehensive evaluations are implemented on two existing data sets, where subjective experimental results show that most of the micro-cracks can be detected, and the objective experimental results show that the method proposed in this study has better performance in detecting precision.

Originality/value

First, an adaptive deep features extraction scheme without any supervised training is proposed for micro-crack detection. Second, the visual saliency is introduced for micro-crack detection.

Details

Sensor Review, vol. 40 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0260-2288

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 8 February 2018

Xiaoliang Qian, Heqing Zhang, Cunxiang Yang, Yuanyuan Wu, Zhendong He, Qing-E Wu and Huanlong Zhang

This paper aims to improve the generalization capability of feature extraction scheme by introducing a micro-cracks detection method based on self-learning features. Micro-cracks…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to improve the generalization capability of feature extraction scheme by introducing a micro-cracks detection method based on self-learning features. Micro-cracks detection of multicrystalline solar cell surface based on machine vision is fast, economical, intelligent and easier for on-line detection. However, the generalization capability of feature extraction scheme adopted by existed methods is limited, which has become an obstacle for further improving the detection accuracy.

Design/methodology/approach

A novel micro-cracks detection method based on self-learning features and low-rank matrix recovery is proposed in this paper. First, the input image is preprocessed to suppress the noises and remove the busbars and fingers. Second, a self-learning feature extraction scheme in which the feature extraction templates are changed along with the input image is introduced. Third, the low-rank matrix recovery is applied to the decomposition of self-learning feature matrix for obtaining the preliminary detection result. Fourth, the preliminary detection result is optimized by incorporating the superpixel segmentation. Finally, the optimized result is further fine-tuned by morphological postprocessing.

Findings

Comprehensive evaluations are implemented on a data set which includes 120 testing images and corresponding human-annotated ground truth. Specifically, subjective evaluations show that the shape of detected micro-cracks is similar to the ground truth, and objective evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method has a high detection accuracy.

Originality/value

First, a self-learning feature extraction method which has good generalization capability is proposed. Second, the low-rank matrix recovery is combined with superpixel segmentation for locating the defective regions.

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