A Hybrid Fuzzy Convolutional Neural Network Based Mechanism for Photovoltaic Cell Defect Detection With Electroluminescence Images

In the intelligent manufacturing process of solar photovoltaic (PV) cells, the automatic defect detection system using the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) smart cameras and sensors cooperated in IIoT has become a promising solution. Many works have been devoted to defect detection of PV cells in a data-driven way. However, because of the subjectivity and fuzziness of human annotation, the data contains a high quantity of noise and unpredictable uncertainties, which creates great difficulties in automatic defect detection. To address this problem, we propose a novel architecture named fuzzy convolution, which integrates fuzzy logic and convolution operations at microscopic level. Combining the proposed fuzzy convolution with the regular convolution, we build a network called Hybrid Fuzzy Convolutional Neural Network (HFCNN). Compared with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), HFCNN can address the uncertainties of PV cell data to improve the accuracy with fewer parameters, making it possible to apply our method in smart cameras. Experimental results on a public dataset show the superiority of our proposed method compared with CNNs.