Identifying small decentralized solar systems in aerial images using deep learning

Abstract

Statistics on installed solar energy systems (SES) play a crucial role in the solar energy industry, providing valuable information for a wide range of stakeholders, such as policy makers, authorities, and financial evaluators. For example, grid operators rely on accurate data on photovoltaic penetration levels to ensure the quality and stability of the power supply. In this research, we present an automatic approach helping generate these statistics using deep learning and image processing techniques. Our proposed model is a machine learning approach that utilizes a specific architecture of convolutional neural networks (CNN) called the “U-net” to detect SES from aerial images. We experimented different network settings to enhance the SES identification performance.In this study, the model was evaluated using two datasets from different locations, one from Sweden and one from Germany. Additionally, the model was trained and tested on a combination of both datasets. The impact of image resolution was also examined. The experimental results show that this architecture performs better than many recent CNN models that have been proposed in the literature for the task of SES identification from aerial images. To make it easy for others to replicate our findings, We have shared all the scripts, software, and dependencies required for running the model in this paper, along with instructions on how to use it in Appendix A.