Photovoltaic Installations Change Detection from Remote Sensing Images Using Deep Learning

The development and monitoring of Photovoltaic (PV) installations is of great interests for the Chinese energy management agency in recent years. The traditional land change detection of PV installations has issues pertaining to low efficiency and high missed detection rates. Therefore, this paper explores an efficient and high accurate detection method of PV installations land using changes from remote sensing images in order to help relevant stakeholders to better manage and monitor urban energy and environment. In this paper, Full Convolutional Network (FCN) and classical segmentation convolutional network (U-Net) based deep learning algorithms are used to build change detection models. To evaluate the model performance, we have built the change detection dataset from Northeast Petroleum University - Photovoltaic Remote Sensing Dataset (NEPU-PRSD) of PV installations in Western China. The experimental results show that both models can achieve good accuracy in change detection regarding PV installations.