wind turbine inspection; Wind turbine; Damage inspection; Blade segmentation; Thermal imaging; Data fusion; Multimodal complementarity; Deep learning

Blade damage inspection without stopping the normal operation of wind turbines has significant economic value. This study proposes an AI-based method AQUADA-Seg to segment the images of blades from complex backgrounds by fusing optical and thermal videos taken from normal operating wind turbines. The method follows an encoder-decoder architecture and uses both optical and thermal videos to overcome the challenges associated with field application.