Barely-Visible Surface Crack Detection for Wind Turbine Sustainability

Jonathan Lwowski, Isaac Corley, Conor Wallace

Abstract: The production of wind energy is a crucial part of sustainable development and reducing the reliance on fossil fuels. Maintaining the integrity of wind turbines to produce this energy is a costly and time-consuming task requiring repeated inspection and maintenance. While autonomous drones have proven to make this process more efficient, the algorithms for detecting anomalies to prevent catastrophic damage to turbine blades have fallen behind due to some dangerous defects, such as hairline cracks, being barely-visible. Existing datasets and literature are lacking and tend towards detecting obvious and visible defects in addition to not being geographically diverse. In this paper we introduce a novel and diverse dataset of barelyvisible hairline cracks collected from numerous wind turbine inspections. To prove the efficacy of our dataset, we detail our end-to-end deployed turbine crack detection pipeline from the …