Defect Detection on a Wind Turbine Blade Based on Digital Image Processing

Abstract

Wind power generation is a widely used power generation technology. Among these, the wind turbine blade is an important part of a wind turbine. If the wind turbine blade is damaged, it will cause serious consequences. The traditional methods of defect detection for wind turbine blades are mainly manual detection and acoustic nondestructive detection, which are unsafe and time-consuming, and have low accuracy. In order to detect the defects on wind turbine blades more safely, conveniently, and accurately, this paper studied a defect detection method for wind turbine blades based on digital image processing. Because the log-Gabor filter used needed to extract features through multiple filter templates, the number of output images was large. Firstly, this paper used the Lévy flight strategy to improve the PSO algorithm to create the LPSO algorithm. The improved LPSO algorithm could successfully solve the PSO algorithm’s problem of falling into the local optimal solution. Then, the LPSO algorithm and log-Gabor filter were used to generate an adaptive filter, which could directly output the optimal results in multiple feature extraction images. Finally, a classifier based on HOG + SVM was used to identify and classify the defect types. The method extracted and identified the scratch-type, crack-type, sand-hole-type, and spot-type defects, and the recognition rate was more than 92%.