Design Of An Open-CV Based Application Software For The Detection Of Light-spots Reflected By Heliostats

With the continuing reduction of mineral energy resources, renewable energies are becoming more and more important. Due to its abundance and cleaniness, solar energy has been one of the most important re-newable energy resources. Among different solar energy applications, concentration solar power plant (CSP) use heliostats to refect sun beam into a heat-receiver on the tower to generate power. Hence, the concentrating accuracy of sun beam reflected by heliostat is one of the key issues in CSP.In this paper, a program for light spot detection is designed using OpenCV image processing library and MFC. The works done in the paper include the following.1. The background, meaning and trend of solar energy and visual detection is analyzed.2. An algorithm for target detection based upon feature matching is proposed to determine the target center correctly even with partial absence of the image.3. Several algorithms for centroid determination are compared to finally propose the very algorithm for light spot centroid position detection based upon dynamic elliptical templates. And the validity of it is confirmed too, with the simulation of experiments.The software is undergone in total Chinese in the user interface, control safety and installation simplicity. On the one hand, the software is available to real-time monitoring for the light spot images with the aid of a camera, one the other hand, further processing is feasible too, and not obly light spot images, but also other images in industries. The software has been undergone both in simulative and realistic situations, and its instantaneity and validity are well proven.