Benchmarking CNN and Transformer-Based Object Detectors for UAV Solar Panel Inspection
Timely and accurate detection of defects and contaminants in solar panels is critical for maintaining the efficiency and reliability of photovoltaic (PV) systems. While recent studies have applied deep learning to PV inspection, fair benchmarking across detector architectures and unbiased handling of class imbalance remain limited. This work presents a comprehensive benchmark of convolutional and transformer-based object detectors on UAV-captured RGB imagery of solar panels. It introduces a class-targeted augmentation strategy applied exclusively to the training split to mitigate imbalance without compromising evaluation integrity. Faster R-CNN with ResNet50 and MobileNetV3 backbones, RetinaNet with ResNet50, YOLOv5, YOLOv8, and Swin Transformer backbones integrated with Faster R-CNN (Tiny, Small, and Base variants) are evaluated. Performance is assessed using mean Average Precision (mAP) across multiple IoU thresholds, precision, recall, F1 score, and inference throughput to enable accuracy-throughput tradeoff analysis relevant to UAV deployment. Experimental results show that Faster R-CNN with a ResNet50 backbone achieves the highest localization accuracy, with mAP@0.5 of 0.893 and mAP@0.5:0.95 of 0.759, whereas the MobileNetV3 variant provides the best overall reliability balance, achieving recall of 0.745, F1-score of 0.809, and accuracy of 0.679 on the test set. The dataset and code will be released upon acceptance of the paper.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Minimal Sensing for Orienting a Solar Panel
A solar panel harvests the most energy when pointing in the direction that maximizes the total illumination (irradiance) falling on it. Given an arbitrary orientation of a panel and an arbitrary environmental illuminatio…
SolarFormer: Multi-scale Transformer for Solar PV Profiling
As climate change intensifies, the global imperative to shift towards sustainable energy sources becomes more pronounced. Photovoltaic (PV) energy is a favored choice due to its reliability and ease of installation. Accu…
DecoderOrigami Inspired Solar Panel Design
The goal of this paper was to take a flat solar panel and make cuts on the panel to make smaller, but still viable solar panels. These smaller solar panels could then be arranged in a tree-like design. The hope was that …
Evolutionary AlgorithmsCalculation of the Optimal Installation Angle for Seasonal Adjusting of PV Panels Based on Solar Radiation Prediction
An important parameter that affects PV panel performance of a solar power system is the incident solar radiation with the panel or panel's area of exposure to the sun. The direction and tilt angle of a PV panel are two i…
HyperionSolarNet: Solar Panel Detection from Aerial Images
With the effects of global climate change impacting the world, collective efforts are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The energy sector is the single largest contributor to climate change and many efforts are …
SegmentationSemantic Segmentation