1,128 research outputs found
Mapping solar array location, size, and capacity using deep learning and overhead imagery
The effective integration of distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays into
existing power grids will require access to high quality data; the location,
power capacity, and energy generation of individual solar PV installations.
Unfortunately, existing methods for obtaining this data are limited in their
spatial resolution and completeness. We propose a general framework for
accurately and cheaply mapping individual PV arrays, and their capacities, over
large geographic areas. At the core of this approach is a deep learning
algorithm called SolarMapper - which we make publicly available - that can
automatically map PV arrays in high resolution overhead imagery. We estimate
the performance of SolarMapper on a large dataset of overhead imagery across
three US cities in California. We also describe a procedure for deploying
SolarMapper to new geographic regions, so that it can be utilized by others. We
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed deployment procedure by using it
to map solar arrays across the entire US state of Connecticut (CT). Using these
results, we demonstrate that we achieve highly accurate estimates of total
installed PV capacity within each of CT's 168 municipal regions
Super-Resolution for Overhead Imagery Using DenseNets and Adversarial Learning
Recent advances in Generative Adversarial Learning allow for new modalities
of image super-resolution by learning low to high resolution mappings. In this
paper we present our work using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with
applications to overhead and satellite imagery. We have experimented with
several state-of-the-art architectures. We propose a GAN-based architecture
using densely connected convolutional neural networks (DenseNets) to be able to
super-resolve overhead imagery with a factor of up to 8x. We have also
investigated resolution limits of these networks. We report results on several
publicly available datasets, including SpaceNet data and IARPA Multi-View
Stereo Challenge, and compare performance with other state-of-the-art
architectures.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, WACV 2018 submissio
A Weakly Supervised Approach for Estimating Spatial Density Functions from High-Resolution Satellite Imagery
We propose a neural network component, the regional aggregation layer, that
makes it possible to train a pixel-level density estimator using only
coarse-grained density aggregates, which reflect the number of objects in an
image region. Our approach is simple to use and does not require
domain-specific assumptions about the nature of the density function. We
evaluate our approach on several synthetic datasets. In addition, we use this
approach to learn to estimate high-resolution population and housing density
from satellite imagery. In all cases, we find that our approach results in
better density estimates than a commonly used baseline. We also show how our
housing density estimator can be used to classify buildings as residential or
non-residential.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures. ACM SIGSPATIAL 2018, Seattle, US
Leveraging Overhead Imagery for Localization, Mapping, and Understanding
Ground-level and overhead images provide complementary viewpoints of the world. This thesis proposes methods which leverage dense overhead imagery, in addition to sparsely distributed ground-level imagery, to advance traditional computer vision problems, such as ground-level image localization and fine-grained urban mapping. Our work focuses on three primary research areas: learning a joint feature representation between ground-level and overhead imagery to enable direct comparison for the task of image geolocalization, incorporating unlabeled overhead images by inferring labels from nearby ground-level images to improve image-driven mapping, and fusing ground-level imagery with overhead imagery to enhance understanding. The ultimate contribution of this thesis is a general framework for estimating geospatial functions, such as land cover or land use, which integrates visual evidence from both ground-level and overhead image viewpoints
Learning to Map the Visual and Auditory World
The appearance of the world varies dramatically not only from place to place but also from hour to hour and month to month. Billions of images that capture this complex relationship are uploaded to social-media websites every day and often are associated with precise time and location metadata. This rich source of data can be beneficial to improve our understanding of the globe. In this work, we propose a general framework that uses these publicly available images for constructing dense maps of different ground-level attributes from overhead imagery. In particular, we use well-defined probabilistic models and a weakly-supervised, multi-task training strategy to provide an estimate of the expected visual and auditory ground-level attributes consisting of the type of scenes, objects, and sounds a person can experience at a location. Through a large-scale evaluation on real data, we show that our learned models can be used for applications including mapping, image localization, image retrieval, and metadata verification
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