Abstract: With the rapid development of industrialization for wind power electricity generation, the continuous expansion of wind turbine capacity, the length of wind turbine blades is increasing, and the probability of blade damages is also increasing. Therefore, it is very urgent and important to monitor the condition of the wind turbine blade and detect the defect. As the traditional methods used for detecting the wind turbine blades are time-consuming, laborious and costly, this study proposed a new method based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and image processing technologies to achieve the wind blade inspection rapidly, automatically and low-costly. An experiment is carried out to test the defect detection performance of the proposed method by using the wind turbine blade images collected in real situations. Furthermore, the experimental results show that the presented algorithm is effectiveness, reliability and accuracy, which can basically meet the requirements of blade defect detection, and is of great significance in practical engineering.

Key words: wind turbine blade, defect detection, UAV, image processing, composites