The invention discloses a defect detection method for a solar cell panel, which is. realized through a measurement system formed by a test rack, a gray area array camera, a telecentric lens, an annular light source and an objective table and includesTest stand, Gray area array camera, A measurement system constructed by a telecentric lens, an annular light source and an objective table is realizedby the following steps of: shooting a picture of a solar cell panel, respectively carrying out expansion processing in horizontal and vertical directions, carrying out edge detection by adopting a canny operator, rotating the image by adopting Hough transformation, and repairing a cavity value of the rotated image; fFiltering and denoising, carrying out brightness equalization processing by adopting gamma correction, and uniformly segmenting the image; converting the segmented image into a matrix D by adopting a robust principal component algorithm, decomposing the matrix D into a low-rank matrix A and a sparse matrix E, and performing recovery processing on the matrix D according to an APG gradient approximation algorithm; and carrying out reverse returning operation on the low-rank matrix A and the sparse matrix E to a single wafer image, carrying out low-rank matrix decomposition technology processing to obtain a defective solar cell panel image, and then detecting a defect position.