Micro-cracks detection of solar cells surface via combining short-term and long-term deep features

The machine vision based methods for micro-cracks detection of solar cells surface have become one of the main research directions with its efficiency and convenience. The existed methods are roughly classified into two categories: current viewing information based methods, prior knowledge based methods, however, the former usually adopt hand-designed features with poor generality and lacks the guidance of prior knowledge, the latter are usually implemented through the machine learning, and the generalization ability is also limited since the large-scale annotation dataset is scarce. To resolve above problems, a novel micro-cracks detection method via combining short-term and long-term deep features is proposed in this paper. The short-term deep features which represent the current viewing information are learned from the input image itself through stacked denoising auto encoder (SDAE), the long-term deep features which represent the prior knowledge are learned from a large number of natural scene images that people often see through convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The subjective and objective evaluations demonstrate that: 1) the performance of combining the short-term and long-term deep features is better than any of them alone, 2) the performance of proposed method is superior to the shallow learning based methods, 3) the proposed method can effectively detect various kinds of micro-cracks.