Satellite remote imaging enables the detailed study of land use patterns on a global scale. We investigate the possibility to improve the information content of traditional land use classification by identifying the nature of industrial sites from medium-resolution remote sensing images. In this work, we focus on classifying different types of power plants from Sentinel-2 imaging data. Using a ResNet-50 deep learning model, we are able to achieve a mean accuracy of 90.0% in distinguishing 10 different power plant types and a background class. Furthermore, we are able to identify the cooling mechanisms utilized in thermal power plants with a mean accuracy of 87.5%. Our results enable us to qualitatively investigate the energy mix from Sentinel-2 imaging data, and prove the feasibility to classify industrial sites on a global scale from freely available satellite imagery.
@article{arxiv.2107.10894,
title = {Power Plant Classification from Remote Imaging with Deep Learning},
author = {Michael Mommert and Linus Scheibenreif and Joëlle Hanna and Damian Borth},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.10894},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
Presented at the 2021 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS)