Solar power is environmentally friendly and promoted by government agencies and power distribution companies. Government agencies can use solar panel detection to offer incentives such as tax exemptions and credits to residents who have installed solar panels. Policy makers can use it to gauge adoption and frame schemes to spread awareness and promote the use of solar power in areas that lack it. This information can also serve as an input to solar panel installation and utility companies and help redirect their marketing efforts.
Traditional ways of obtaining information about solar panel installation, such as surveys and on-site visits, are time-consuming and prone to error. Deep learning models are highly capable of learning complex semantics and can produce high-quality results. Use this deep learning model to automate the task of solar panel detection, significantly reducing time and effort.
License requirements
To complete this workflow, the following are the license requirements:
- ArcGIS Desktop—ArcGIS Image Analyst extension for ArcGIS Pro
- ArcGIS Enterprise—ArcGIS Image Server
- ArcGIS Online—ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online
Model details
This model has the following characteristics:
- Input—Raster, mosaic dataset, or image service (5–15 centimeter spatial resolution).
- Output—Feature class containing bounding boxes depicting solar panel locations.
- Compute—This workflow is compute-intensive and a GPU with compute capability of 6.0 or higher is recommended
- Applicable geographies—This model is designed to work well in the United States.
- Architecture—This model uses the MaskRCNN model architecture implemented in ArcGIS API for Python.
- Accuracy metrics—This model has an average precision score of 0.76.
Access and download the model
Download the Solar Panel Detection—USA pretrained model from ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World. Alternatively, access the model directly from ArcGIS Pro using the Detect Solar Panels ArcGIS Pro project template, or consume it in ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online.
- Browse to ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World.
- Sign in with your ArcGIS Online credentials.
- Search for Solar Panel Detection—USA and open the item page from the search results.
- Click the Download button to download the model.You can use the downloaded .dlpk file directly in ArcGIS Pro, or upload and use it in ArcGIS Enterprise. Additionally, you can fine-tune the pretrained model if necessary.
Release notes
The following are the release notes:
| Date | Description |
|---|---|
| November 2021 |
|