YOLO-MSG: A Lightweight and Real-Time Photovoltaic Defect Detection Algorithm for Edge Computing

Photovoltaic (PV) power stations are pivotal for the renewable energy transition, yet their operational efficiency is often compromised by defects such as surface dust accumulation and cracks. Traditional manual inspections are labor-intensive and subjective, while conventional monitoring methods struggle with environmental interference. This study proposes YOLO-MSG, a lightweight framework specifically designed for the automated detection of PV module defects during system operation, including normal panels as well as defective conditions such as dusty and cracked panels. The methodology integrates a Multi-Scale Grouped Convolution (MSGC) module for enhanced feature extraction and a Group-Stem Decoupled Head (GSD-Head) to reduce parameter redundancy. Furthermore, a joint optimization strategy involving LAMP and logits-based knowledge distillation is employed to facilitate edge deployment. Experimental results on a specialized PV defect dataset demonstrate that YOLO-MSG achieves a superior balance between detection accuracy and computational cost. Compared to state-of-the-art models like YOLO11 and YOLOv12, YOLO-MSG significantly reduces GFLOPs and parameter count while maintaining highly competitive mean Average Precision (mAP), with improvements of 1.35% in mAP and 2.37% in mAP50-95 over the baseline models. Specifically, the model achieves an average inference speed of 90.30 FPS on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX platform. These findings confirm the algorithm’s industrial viability, providing a robust and efficient solution for the real-time automated maintenance of photovoltaic infrastructures.