Detecting snow-covered solar panels is crucial as it allows us to remove snow using heating techniques more efficiently and restores the photovoltaic system to proper operation. This paper presents classification and detection performance analyses for snow-covered solar panel images. The classification analysis consists of two cases, and the detection analysis consists of one case based on three backbones. In this study, five deep learning models, namely visual geometry group-16 (VGG-16), VGG-19, residual neural network-18 (RESNET-18), RESNET-50, and RESNET-101, are used to classify solar panel images. The models are trained, validated, and tested under different conditions. The first case of classification is performed on the original dataset without preprocessing. In the second case, extreme climate conditions are simulated by generating motion noise; furthermore, the dataset is replicated using the upsampling technique to handle the unbalancing issue. For the detection case, a region-based convolutional neural network (RCNN) detector is used to detect the three categories of solar panels, which are all_snow, no_snow, and partial. The dataset of these categories is taken from the second case in the classification approach. Finally, we proposed a blind image deblurring algorithm (BIDA) that can be a preprocessing step before the CNN (BIDA-CNN) model. The accuracy of the models was compared and verified; the accuracy results show that the proposed CNN-based blind image deblurring algorithm (BIDA-CNN) outperformed other models evaluated in this study.

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Recently, the demand for renewable energy has increased due to its environmental and economic needs. Solar panels are the mainstay for dealing with solar energy and converting it into another form of usable energy. Solar panels work under suitable climatic conditions that allow the light photons to access the solar cells, as any blocking of sunlight on these cells causes a halt in the panels work and restricts the carry of these photons. Thus, the panels are unable to work under these conditions. A layer of snow forms on the solar panels due to snowfall in areas with low temperatures. Therefore, it causes an insulating layer on solar panels and the inability to produce electrical energy. The detection of snow-covered solar panels is crucial, as it allows us the opportunity to remove snow using some heating techniques more efficiently and restore the photovoltaics system to proper operation. This paper presents five deep learning models, -16, -19, ESNET-18, ESNET-50, and ESNET-101, which are used for the recognition and classification of solar panel images. In this paper, two different cases were applied; the first case is performed on the original dataset without trying any kind of preprocessing, and the second case is extreme climate conditions and simulated by generating motion noise. Furthermore, the dataset was replicated using the upsampling technique in order to handle the unbalancing issue. The conducted dataset is divided into three different categories, namely; all_snow, no_snow, and partial snow. The five models are trained, validated, and tested on this dataset under the same conditions 60% training, 20% validation, and testing 20% for both cases. The accuracy of the models has been compared and verified to distinguish and classify the processed dataset. The accuracy results in the first case show that the compared models -16, -19, ESNET-18, and ESNET-50 give 0.9592, while ESNET-101 gives 0.9694. In the second case, the models outperformed their counterparts in the first case by evaluating performance, where the accuracy results reached 1.00, 0.9545, 0.9888, 1.00. and 1.00 for -16, -19, ESNET-18 and ESNET-50, respectively. Consequently, we conclude that the second case models outperformed their peers.

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