PrivAgriVolt: Privacy-Preserving Shadow-Aware Vision for Crop Stress Diagnosis in Agrivoltaic Photovoltaic Systems

Abstract

Agrivoltaic systems co-locate photovoltaic (PV) arrays and crops, offering land-use efficiency and potential microclimate benefits, yet they introduce new challenges for computer-vision-based crop monitoring. PV structures produce strong, spatially varying shadows, specular reflections, and periodic occlusions that confound visual cues for diagnosing crop diseases and abiotic stresses. Meanwhile, agrivoltaic deployments are often distributed across farms and operators, making centralized data collection impractical due to privacy, ownership, and regulatory concerns. This paper proposes PrivAgriVolt, a novel privacy-preserving learning framework for agrivoltaic crop issue recognition that explicitly models PV-induced illumination and enables collaborative training without sharing raw images. The core algorithm integrates (i) a PV-geometry-conditioned shadow normalization module that fuses estimated array layout and sun-angle priors into a shadow-aware appearance canonization network, reducing illumination-induced domain shift across times and sites; (ii) a federated contrastive stress learner that aligns stress semantics across farms via prototype-based contrastive objectives while remaining robust to heterogeneous sensors and crop stages; and (iii) an adaptive privacy layer that combines secure aggregation with budget-aware gradient perturbation and client-level clipping to provide formal privacy guarantees while preserving fine-grained diagnostic performance. Extensive experiments on real agricultural vision benchmarks and agrivoltaic shadow variants demonstrate that PrivAgriVolt improves stress recognition and segmentation under PV shading while maintaining strong privacy–utility trade-offs.

Code and data availability

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