Solar Panel Detection with Satellite Imagery

In this episode, I catch up with Federico Bessi to dive into a fascinating end-to-end project on the automatic detection of photovoltaic (PV) solar plants using satellite imagery and deep learning. Federico walks us through how he built a complete pipeline—from sourcing and preprocessing data using the Brazil Data Cube, to annotating solar farms in QGIS, training models in PyTorch, and finally deploying a web app on AWS to visualise the predictions.
This is interesting because solar energy infrastructure is expanding rapidly, yet tracking it globally remains a major challenge. This project…