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Advances in deep learning techniques for remote sensing as well as the increased availability of high-resolution data enable the extraction of more detailed information from aerial images. One promising task is the semantic segmentation of roof segments and their orientation. However, the lack of annotated data is a major barrier for deploying respective models on a large scale. Previous research demonstrated the viability of the deep learning approach for the task, but currently, published datasets are small-scale, manually labeled, and rare. Therefore, this paper extends the state of the art by presenting a novel method for the automated generation of large-scale datasets based on semantic 3D city models. Furthermore, we train a model on a dataset 50 times larger than existing datasets and achieve superior performance while applying it to a wider variety of buildings. We evaluate the approach by comparing networks trained on four dataset configurations, including an existing dataset and our novel large-scale dataset. The results show that the network performance measured as intersection over union can be increased from 0.60 for the existing dataset to 0.70 when the large-scale model is applied on the same region. The large-scale model performs superiorly even when applied to more diverse test samples, achieving 0.635. The novel approach contributes to solving the dataset bottleneck and consequently to improving semantic segmentation of roof segments. The resulting remotely sensed information is crucial for applications such as solar potential analysis or urban planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global solar photovoltaic capacity has consistently doubled every 18 months over the last two decades, going from 0.3 GW in 2000 to 643 GW in 2019, and is forecast to reach 4240 GW by 2040. However, these numbers are uncertain, and virtually all reporting on deployments lacks a unified source of either information or validation. In this paper, we propose, optimize, and validate a deep learning framework to detect and map solar farms using a state-of-the-art semantic segmentation convolutional neural network applied to satellite imagery. As a final step in the pipeline, we propose a model to estimate the energy generation capacity of the detected solar energy facilities. Objectively, the deep learning model achieved highly competitive performance indicators, including a mean accuracy of 96.87%, and a Jaccard Index (intersection over union of classified pixels) score of 95.5%. Subjectively, it was found to detect spaces between panels producing a segmentation output at a sub-farm level that was better than human labeling. Finally, the detected areas and predicted generation capacities were validated against publicly available data to within an average error of 4.5% Deep learning applied specifically for the detection and mapping of solar farms is an active area of research, and this deep learning capacity evaluation pipeline is one of the first of its kind. We also share an original dataset of overhead solar farm satellite imagery comprising 23,000 images (256 × 256 pixels each), and the corresponding labels upon which the machine learning model was trained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep-learning methods, especially convolutional neural networks (CNN), have become the first choice for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification to date. It is a common procedure that small cubes are cropped from hyperspectral images and then fed into CNNs. However, standard CNNs find it difficult to extract discriminative spectral–spatial features. How to obtain finer spectral–spatial features to improve the classification performance is now a hot topic of research. In this regard, the attention mechanism, which has achieved excellent performance in other computer vision, holds the exciting prospect. In this paper, we propose a double-branch network consisting of a novel convolution named pyramidal convolution (PyConv) and an iterative attention mechanism. Each branch concentrates on exploiting spectral or spatial features with different PyConvs, supplemented by the attention module for refining the feature map. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can yield competitive performance compared to other state-of-the-art models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, benefiting from the rapid development of deep learning technology in the field of computer vision, the study of hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has also made great progress. However, compared with ordinary RGB images, HSIs are more like 3D cubes; therefore, it is necessary and beneficial to explore classification methods suitable for the very special data structure of HSIs. In this paper, we propose Multiple Spectral Resolution 3D Convolutional Neural Network (MSR-3DCNN) for HSI classification tasks. In MSR-3DCNN, we expand the idea of multi-scale feature fusion and dilated convolution from the spatial dimension to the spectral dimension, and combine 3D convolution and residual connection; therefore, it can better adapt to the 3D cubic form of hyperspectral data and make efficient use of spectral information in different bands. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach and its superiority as compared with some state-of-the-art (SOTA) HSI classification methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]