From grayscale image to battery aging awareness – a new battery capacity estimation model with computer vision approach

Accurate detection of capacity degradation is critical to the safe and efficient utilization of battery systems. Many datadriven capacity estimators were proposed based on emerging intelligent algorithms, but their accuracy depends on the data of complete charged/discharged process and complex algorithm structures. This paper developed a computer vision (CV)-based method, constructing battery multidimensional aging features as the key image to estimate capacity using specific charging data segment. Specifically, the designed image-aging recognition method is used to extract multidimensional aging features from the partial charging current sequence and then establish map inputs for a computer vision model that recognizes the constructed feature maps. Consequently, the mapping relationship between the charging information and capacity degradation can be obtained as the two-dimensional grayscale images which contain massive extracted features in their small size hence greatly simplify the network structure in CV model so as to improve estimation accuracy and efficiency significantly. More importantly, since the model input is a specific charging current segment rather than the data of complete charging process, the model applicability to the random and incomplete charging process of electric vehicles can be greatly improved. Battery cycling data from different types of Li-ion cells was utilized for performance verification. Compared with the conventional estimation methods proposed previously, the proposed method demonstrates the great superiority in terms of the model applicability, estimation accuracy and computational efficiency for online capacity estimation in actual battery usage.