PVEL-AD: A Large-Scale Open-World Dataset for Photovoltaic Cell Anomaly Detection

The anomaly detection in photovoltaic (PV) cell electroluminescence (EL) image is of great significance for the vision-based fault diagnosis. Many researchers are committed to solving this problem, but a large-scale open-world dataset is required to validate their novel ideas. We build a PV EL Anomaly Detection (PVEL-AD1, 2, 3) dataset for polycrystalline solar cell, which contains 36 543 near-infrared images with various internal defects and heterogeneous background. This dataset contains anomaly free images and anomalous images with ten different categories. Moreover, 37 380 ground truth bounding boxes are provided for eight types of defects. We also carry out a comprehensive evaluation of the state-of-the-art object detection methods based on deep learning. The evaluation results on this dataset provide the initial benchmark, which is convenient for follow-up researchers to conduct experimental comparisons. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first public dataset for PV solar cell anomaly detection that provides box-wise ground truth. Furthermore, this dataset can also be used for the evaluation of many computer vision tasks such as few-shot detection, one-class classification, and anomaly generation.