Abstract: Disclosed is an infrared thermal image classification and hot spot positioning method of a photovoltaic panel, comprising following steps: constructing a photovoltaic panel infrared thermal image data set, preprocessing the image data set, and dividing into a training set and a testing set according to a preset proportion; training an auxiliary generating countermeasure network based on the training set to obtain a trained generator and a trained discriminator, training an encoder by combining the image data in the training set with the generator, and fixing the parameters of a trained encoder; inputting the image data in the test set into a trained discriminator to obtain a photovoltaic image classification result; inputting images in the test set into the trained encoder, and then inputting the images into the generator for a reconstruction; comparing pixels of the input images with the reconstructed infrared thermal images, and positioning hot spots.