Reducing the gap between general purpose data and aerial images in concentrated solar power plants

Abstract

In the context of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants, aerial images captured by drones present a unique set of challenges. Unlike urban or natural landscapes commonly found in existing datasets, solar fields contain highly reflective surfaces, and domain-specific elements that are uncommon in traditional computer vision benchmarks. As a result, machine learning models trained on generic datasets struggle to generalize to this setting without extensive retraining and large volumes of annotated data. However, collecting and labeling such data is costly and time-consuming, making it impractical for rapid deployment in industrial applications. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach: the creation of AerialCSP, a virtual dataset that simulates aerial imagery of CSP plants. By generating synthetic data that closely mimic real-world conditions, our objective is to facilitate pretraining of models before deployment, significantly reducing the need for extensive manual labeling. Our main contributions are threefold: (1) we introduce AerialCSP, a high-quality synthetic dataset for aerial inspection of CSP plants, providing annotated data for object detection and image segmentation; (2) we benchmark multiple models on AerialCSP, establishing a baseline for CSP-related vision tasks; and (3) we demonstrate that pretraining on AerialCSP significantly improves real-world fault detection, particularly for rare and small defects, reducing the need for extensive manual labeling. AerialCSP is made publicly available at https://mpcutino.github.io/aerialcsp/.