GMD-YOLO: A Dual-Modality Framework with Multi-Scale Enhancement and Adaptive Fusion for PV Fault Detection

Photovoltaic (PV) module faults, such as hotspots, diode short circuits, occlusions, and shadows, degrade power generation efficiency and safety. Existing manual inspection and single-modality methods show limited robustness under complex conditions, especially with illumination variations and weak thermal responses, while most deep learning approaches fail to exploit the complementarity of visible and infrared modalities. To address this issue, a dual-modality visible–infrared fusion framework based on YOLO11 is proposed, integrating a multi-scale pyramid pooling and dilated convolution module (MSPPD), a gradient-aware fusion module (GAFusion), and a dynamic convolution and element-wise scaling detection head (Detect-DEhead). GAFusion enhances cross-modal structural consistency and reduces feature misalignment and information loss during fusion by introducing gradient-aware feature interaction. Shape-IoU loss is employed to improve localization accuracy. The proposed method improves mean average precision (mAP)@0.5 from 86.7% to 88.1%, while reducing parameters, computational cost, and model size from 4.3 M to 3.7 M, 11.42 GFLOPs to 9.37 GFLOPs, and 9.1 MB to 7.9 MB, respectively. With Shape-IoU, [email protected] reaches 88.4%, and recall increases from 78.5% to 84.9%. Experiments on the FLIR Thermal dataset achieve gains of 2.2%, 1.6%, and 2.7% in precision, recall, and [email protected]. The method achieves an effective trade-off between accuracy and efficiency for intelligent PV module inspection.