Over the last decade, a large number of solar power plants have been installed in Germany. To ensure a high performance, it is necessary to detect defects early. Therefore, it is required to control the quality of the solar cells during the production process, as well as to monitor the installed modules. Since manual inspections are expensive, a large degree of automation is required.

This project aims to develop a new approach to automatically detect and classify defects on solar power cells and to estimate their impact on the performance. Further, big data methods will be applied to identify circumstances that increase the probability of a cell to become defect. As a result, it will be possible to reject cells in the production that have a high likelihood to become defect.