Dataset for Detecting the Electrical Behavior of Photovoltaic Panels from RGB Images

Abstract

The dynamic reconfiguration and maximum power point tracking in large-scale photovoltaic (PV) systems require a large number of voltage and current sensors. In particular, the reconfiguration process requires a pair of voltage/current sensors for each panel, which introduces costs, increases size and reduces the reliability of the installation. A suitable solution for reducing the number of sensors is to adopt image-based solutions to estimate the electrical characteristics of the PV panels, but the lack of reliable data with large diversity of irradiance and shading conditions is a major problem in this topic. Therefore, this paper presents a dataset correlating RGB images and electrical data of PV panels with different irradiance and shading conditions; moreover, the dataset also provides complementary weather data and additional image characteristics to support the training of estimation models. In particular, the dataset was designed to support the design of image-based estimators of electrical data, which could be used to replace large arrays of sensors. The dataset was captured during 70 days distributed between 2020 and 2021, generating 5211 images and registers. The paper also describes the measurement platform used to collect the data, which will help to replicate the experiments in different geographical locations.

Keywords

• photovoltaic
• image-based estimation
• partial shading
• current vs. voltage characteristic