Lishu Wang

Solar energy plays an important role in renewable energy generation, with the advantages of low pollution, easy installation, and relatively easy access. However, photovoltaic (PV) modules are susceptible to cause localized shading from external factors such as leaves in the canopy, surrounding buildings, etc., which would affect power generation efficiency and even pose safety risks. Existing methods cannot perform well in real-time conditions. This paper proposes a real-time shading monitoring method for the PV module based on computer vision. The gamma transform and histogram matching were adopted to enhance key features and adjust the global gamut strength distribution in the image of the PV module; then the gray-level slicing method finished the segmentation to detect the shadow from the video. All processing can be realized in the real-time monitor camera and the detection results can be displayed on the HMI in PC with high efficiency and low cost. According to tests in the practical complex environment, the method can have enough detection performance and high real-time performance with an accuracy of 0.98, and the F0.5 and F2 values are 0.87 and 0.85, respectively. The metrics of the proposed method are higher than those of the existing Canny detection method, the Random Forest detection method, and the CNN detection method. In addition, the average time required by the proposed method to process a frame is 0.721 s. In addition, the average time required by the method to process an image frame is 0.721 s, which has good real-time performance.

Solar energy plays an important role in renewable energy generation, with the advantages of low pollution, easy installation, and relatively easy access. However, photovoltaic (PV) modules are susceptible to cause localized shading from external factors such as leaves in the canopy, surrounding buildings, etc., which would affect power generation efficiency and even pose safety risks. Existing methods cannot perform well in real-time conditions. This paper proposes a real-time shading monitoring method for the PV module based on computer vision. The gamma transform and histogram matching were adopted to enhance key features and adjust the global gamut strength distribution in the image of the PV module; then the gray-level slicing method finished the segmentation to detect the shadow from the video. All processing can be realized in the real-time monitor camera and the detection results can be displayed on the HMI in PC with high efficiency and low cost. According to tests in the practical complex environment, the method can have enough detection performance and high real-time performance with an accuracy of 0.98, and the F0.5 and F2 values are 0.87 and 0.85, respectively. The metrics of the proposal method are higher than those of existing Canny monitoring methods.

To improve forecasting accuracy for photovoltaic (PV) power output, this paper proposes a hybrid method for forecasting the short-term PV power output. First, by introducing the noise level, an improved complementary ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) with adaptive noise (ICEEMDAN) is developed to determine the ensemble size and amplitude of the added white noise adaptively. ICEEMDAN can change PV power output with non-symmetry into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) with symmetry. ICEEMDAN can enhance the forecasting accuracy for PV power by IMFs with physical meaning (not including spurious modes). Second, the selection method of relative modes (IF), which is determined by the comprehensive factor, including the shape factor, crest factor and Kurtosis, is introduced to adaptively classify the IMFs into groups including similar fluctuating components. The IF can avoid the drawbacks of threshold determination by an empirical method. Third, the modified particle swarm optimization (PSO) (MPSO) is proposed to optimize the hyper-parameters in the support vector machine (SVM) by introducing the piecewise inertial weight. MPSO can improve the global and local search ability to make the particles traverse the global space and strengthen the performance of local convergence. Finally, the proposed method (ICEEMDAN-IF-MPSO-SVM) is used to forecast the PV power output of each group individually, and then, the single forecasting result is reconstructed to obtain the desired forecasting result for PV power output. By comparison with the other typical methods, the proposed method is more suitable for forecasting PV power output.