AI-Driven Damage Detection in Wind Turbines: Drone Imagery and Lightweight Deep Learning Approaches

Wind power plays an increasingly vital role in sustainable energy production, yet the harsh environments in which turbines operate often lead to mechanical or structural degradation. Detecting such faults early is essential to reducing maintenance expenses and extending operational lifetime. In this work, we propose a deep learning-based image classification framework designed to assess turbine condition directly from drone-acquired imagery. Unlike object detection pipelines, which require locating specific damage regions, the proposed strategy focuses on recognizing global visual cues that indicate the overall turbine state. A comprehensive comparison is performed among several lightweight and transformer-based architectures, including MobileNetV3, ResNet, EfficientNet, ConvNeXt, ShuffleNet, ViT, DeiT, and DINOv2, to identify the most suitable model for real-time deployment. The MobileNetV3-Large network achieved the best trade-off between performance and efficiency, reaching 98.9% accuracy while maintaining a compact size of 5.4 million parameters. These results highlight the capability of compact CNNs to deliver accurate and efficient turbine monitoring, paving the way for autonomous, drone-based inspection solutions at the edge.