Segmentation Method for Back Electrodes in Solar Cells

An automatic quality inspection system, aiming to recognize defective products that would bring great damage, is essential for the production of solar cells. However, few papers focus on the detection of back electrodes in solar cells. Segmenting electrodes accurately is the first step of defect detection for them, for which a complete algorithm is proposed in this paper to segment back electrodes. Firstly, coarse and fine positions of electrodes are obtained using the edge intensity projection and template matching method. And then the edge of electrodes is extracted by the threshold method and seed growing method. Thirdly, an edge-to-region method is adopted to generate a closed region with edge points. To verify the performance of the proposed method, an experiment is carried out. From the experiment result, the segmentation and detection scheme for electrodes proposed in this paper outperforms the three famous methods implemented in the experiment.