Improved SSD-assisted algorithm for surface defect detection of electromagnetic luminescence

Abstract

Defect detection of electromagnetic luminescence (EL) cells is the core step in the production and preparation of solar cell modules to ensure conversion efficiency and long service life of batteries. However, due to the lack of feature extraction capability for small feature defects, the traditional single shot multibox detector (SSD) algorithm performs not well in EL defect detection with high accuracy. Consequently, an improved SSD algorithm with modification in feature fusion in the framework of deep learning is proposed to improve the recognition rate of EL multi-class defects. A dataset containing images with four different types of defects through rotation, denoising, and binarization is established for the EL. The proposed algorithm can greatly improve the detection accuracy of the small-scale defect with the idea of feature pyramid networks. An experimental study on the detection of the EL defects shows the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, a comparison study shows the proposed method outperforms other traditional detection methods, such as the SIFT, Faster R-CNN, and YOLOv3, in detecting the EL defect.