Artificial Vision in Renewable Photovoltaic Systems: A Review and Vision of Specific Applications and Technologies

Renewable energy resources have become extremely important in the current context of air pollution and the production of significant amounts of greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. One of the most important renewable energy sources that has shown the highest growth in recent years is photovoltaic (PV) systems. Due to their significance, this research presents a review of the applications in which artificial computer vision can be used in photovoltaic systems. From the results presented in this review, it will be evident that artificial vision can be applied for several different purposes. The advantages of using this technique will also be highlighted. Additionally, a systematic literature review is presented on the research associated with this topic. Through this review, it will be evident that many advanced algorithms related to image acquisition equipment have been proposed to ensure high reliability and fast results. This review does not merely focus on a specific topic or algorithms associated with image processing applied to photovoltaic systems. Rather, this work presents a broad and comprehensive review detailing all viable applications and associated computer vision technologies that can be deployed within these systems. Besides that, the review will clearly specify which work one is based on public datasets. To allow future reproducibility or research, the links to all public datasets utilized in the works based on them are included.