In recent years, the use of solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies for generating electricity has gained much popularity due to their efficiency, cost-effectiveness, reliability and the need to reduce carbon emissions and air pollution levels around the world in order to control and limit global climate change. Dronebased inspection of Solar Plants is an efficient method to perform preventative and corrective maintenance on the Solar PV arrays installed in large-scale grid-connected Solar PV Plants. Quite a few studies have been made in detecting PV module anomalies from these drone-captured thermal images. The main challenge that most of the applied techniques and models in these studies experience is the capability to detect and localize various PV module defects with high and consistent confidence scores and accuracy. The efficiency and robustness of anomaly detection of these models are also reduced when the testing image scales vary. In this article, we propose the Res-CNN3 framework for defective PV modules region object detection. Res-CNN3 follows a bipartite process for defect regions detection to process the thermal delta of a thermal PV module image using a combination of concatenated CNNs and residual networks to identify whether the thermal image is characteristic of defect regions or not. Logistic regression is employed as the loss function whist the Selective Search (SS) algorithm is utilized to predict the regions of interest (RoI) of the input thermal images for PV module defect regions object detection. Several categories of experiments are performed on the consolidated dataset. The results of these experiments demonstrate that the proposed model surpasses the advanced benchmarked methods in accuracy and computing resource efficiency.
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