YOLO-PV: An Enhanced YOLO11n Model with Multi-Scale Feature Fusion for Photovoltaic Panel Defect Detection

Wentao Cai and Hongfang Lv ()
Additional contact information
Wentao Cai: School of Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Dianji University, Shanghai 201306, China
Hongfang Lv: School of Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Dianji University, Shanghai 201306, China

Energies, 2025, vol. 18, issue 20, 1-21

Abstract: Photovoltaic (PV) panel defect detection is essential for maintaining power generation efficiency and ensuring the safe operation of solar plants. Conventional detectors often suffer from low accuracy and limited adaptability to multi-scale defects. To address this issue, we propose YOLO-PV, an enhanced YOLO11n-based model incorporating three novel modules: the Enhanced Hybrid Multi-Scale Block (EHMSB), the Efficient Scale-Specific Attention Block (ESMSAB), and the ESMSAB-FPN for refined multi-scale feature fusion. YOLO-PV is evaluated on the PVEL-AD dataset and compared against representative detectors including YOLOv5n, YOLOv6n, YOLOv8n, YOLO11n, Faster R-CNN, and RT-DETR. Experimental results demonstrate that YOLO-PV achieves a 6.7% increase in Precision, a 2.9% improvement in mAP@0.5, and a 4.4% improvement in mAP@0.5:0.95, while maintaining real-time performance. These results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed modules in enhancing detection accuracy for PV defect inspection, providing a reliable and efficient solution for smart PV maintenance.

Keywords: improved YOLO11n model; dynamic channel reorganization; cascaded dilated convolution; feature distillation strategy; multi-scale feature fusion; real-time detection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/18/20/5489/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/18/20/5489/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:18:y:2025:i:20:p:5489-:d:1774069

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Cassie Shen

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().