A deep convolutional neural network, with pre-training, for solar photovoltaic array detection in aerial imagery

In this work we consider the problem of developing algorithms that automatically identify small-scale solar photovoltaic arrays in high resolution aerial imagery. Such algorithms potentially offer a faster and cheaper solution to collecting small-scale photovoltaic (PV) information, such as their location, capacity, and the energy they produce. Here we build on previous algorithmic work by employing convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have recently yielded major improvements in other image object recognition problems. We propose a CNN architecture for our recognition problem and then measure its detection performance on the same (publicly available) dataset that was used in previous publications. The results indicate that the CNN yields substantial performance improvements over previous results. We also investigate the recently popular approach of pre-training for CNNs.