High resolution electroluminescence (EL) images captured in the infrared
spectrum allow to visually and non-destructively inspect the quality of
photovoltaic (PV) modules. Currently, however, such a visual inspection
requires trained experts to discern different kinds of defects, which is
time-consuming and expensive. Automated segmentation of cells is therefore a
key step in automating the visual inspection workflow. In this work, we propose
a robust automated segmentation method for extraction of individual solar cells
from EL images of PV modules. This enables controlled studies on large amounts
of data to understanding the effects of module degradation over time-a process
not yet fully understood. The proposed method infers in several steps a
high-level solar module representation from low-level edge features. An
important step in the algorithm is to formulate the segmentation problem in
terms of lens calibration by exploiting the plumbline constraint. We evaluate
our method on a dataset of various solar modules types containing a total of
408 solar cells with various defects. Our method robustly solves this task with
a median weighted Jaccard index of 94.47% and an F1​ score of 97.54%, both
indicating a very high similarity between automatically segmented and ground
truth solar cell masks