Engadget Dec 19, 2018
It would be impractical to count the number of solar panels in the US by hand, and that makes it difficult to gauge just how far the technology has really spread. Stanford researchers have a solution: make AI do the heavy lifting. They’ve crafted a deep learning system, DeepSolar, that mapped every visible solar panel in the US — about 1.47 million of them, if you’re wondering. The neural network-based approach turns satellite imagery into tiles, classifies every pixel within those tiles, and combines those pixels to determine if there are solar panels in a given area, whether they’re large solar farms or individual rooftop installations.
