Aerial image analysis based on improved adaptive clustering for photovoltaic module inspection

Exploitation and using of clean and renewable energy to improve the domestic energy structure is important for building smart city. Photovoltaic (PV) power generation is a good choose, and modules inspection is an important direction of PV power generation. The manual inspection is a common way but is not feasible for large-scale PV systems in practice due to low efficiency, high error rate and long assessment time. Currently inspection system based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has been proved to be a better solution in PV inspection. How to locate PV arrays in aerial image captured by UAV is one of the technical changes exist in UAV-based PV inspection. This paper proposed an improved adaptive clustering method based on k- means algorithm to orientate and acquire single PV array's edge, lots of monitoring data indicate this algorithm has a high accuracy and make the loss rate lower than 5%.