# SIGAN: A Novel Image Generation Method for Solar Cell Defect Segmentation and Augmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.04953 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04953/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Image De-raining Using a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05957/) (2017)
- [Show and Tell: Lessons learned from the 2015 MSCOCO Image Captioning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.06647/) (2016)
- [DeepIGeoS: A Deep Interactive Geodesic Framework for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00652/) (2017)
- [Crossbar-Net: A Novel Convolutional Network for Kidney Tumor Segmentation in CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10484/) (2018)
- [A Unified Framework for Generalizable Style Transfer: Style and Content Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05173/) (2018)
- [Gated Path Selection Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06819/) (2020)
- [S2A: Wasserstein GAN with Spatio-Spectral Laplacian Attention for Multi-Spectral Band Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03867/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Bridging the Data Gap: Spatially Conditioned Diffusion Model for Anomaly Generation in Photovoltaic Electroluminescence Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09604/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Solar cell electroluminescence (EL) defect segmentation is an interesting and challenging topic. Many methods have been proposed for EL defect detection, but these methods are still unsatisfactory due to the diversity of the defect and background. In this paper, we provide a new idea of using generative adversarial network (GAN) for defect segmentation. Firstly, the GAN-based method removes the defect region in the input defective image to get a defect-free image, while keeping the background almost unchanged. Then, the subtracted image is obtained by making difference between the defective input image with the generated defect-free image. Finally, the defect region can be segmented through thresholding the subtracted image. To keep the background unchanged before and after image generation, we propose a novel strong identity GAN (SIGAN), which adopts a novel strong identity loss to constraint the background consistency. The SIGAN can be used not only for defect segmentation, but also small-samples defective dataset augmentation. Moreover, we release a new solar cell EL image dataset named as EL-2019, which includes three types of images: crack, finger interruption and defect-free. Experiments on EL-2019 dataset show that the proposed method achieves 90.34% F-score, which outperforms many state-of-the-art methods in terms of solar cell defects segmentation results.