arXiv Computer Vision

OpenPVMapper: A Multi-source, Nationwide Database of Rooftop Photovoltaic Systems in France

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

Nationally Consistent, Locally Incomplete: A Bayesian Remote-Sensing Audit of Rooftop Photovoltaic Registries

The paper presents a Bayesian framework that uses remote sensing to estimate the true rooftop photovoltaic (PV) capacity, correcting for detector imperfections and providing uncertainty estimates. Applied to France, the method yields a 4.03 GWp estimate for rooftop PV below 36 kWp, aligning with transmission operator data within 3.3% nationally but revealing local under‑reports up to 61%. It also identifies a significant truncation bias in French open PV data, highlighting the need for more reliable capacity estimates worldwide.

By Gabriel Kasmi, Yves-Marie Saint-Drenan, Laurent Dubus, Philippe Blanc
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

SolarBench: A global solar energy nowcasting benchmark

SolarBench is an open global benchmark for image-based solar nowcasting that consolidates over six million sky and satellite images from 11 sites across a decade, paired with irradiance, PV output, and atmospheric data. The benchmark includes a toolbox for reproducible data access, processing, model development, and evaluation. Using SolarBench, the authors benchmark representative models, uncover a gap between average forecasting accuracy and the capture of rapid solar fluctuations, quantify predictability across cloud regimes, and demonstrate data‑efficient adaptation to new PV systems.

By Yuhao Nie, Stephen Campbell, Quentin Paletta, Liwenbo Zhang, Tao Jing, Samer Chaaraoui, Jonathan Giezendanner, Andea Scott, Tao Sun, Cong Feng, Max Aragon, Jacques Camier, Adam Jensen, Florian Kotthoff, Yuexing Yang, Yang Ming, Mengying Li, Stefanie Meilinger, Yupeng Wu, Adam Brandt, Sherrie Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

OpenCVL: An Open, Diverse, and Large-Scale Dataset for Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization

OpenCVL is a large, open dataset for fine-grained cross-view localization, comprising 617,388 ground‑aerial image pairs from 41 European cities. It blends high‑end sensor data with diverse in‑the‑wild images and includes a curation framework to correct pose annotations, enabling reliable evaluation. The dataset also offers cross‑area and snowy test sets to probe generalization, and experiments show that adding noisy in‑the‑wild data improves model performance on clean tests.

By Zimin Xia, Mubariz Zaffar, Junsheng Fu, Alexandre Alahi, Julian F. P. Kooij
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 27

Beyond Binary Rooftop Mapping: A Four-Class Deep Learning Framework for Green Roof Potential Assessment from Open Swiss Geospatial Data

arXiv:2607. 22342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The development of effective urban climate adaptation strategies requires comprehensive spatial information on rooftops and buildings, since such information underpins the assessment of ecosystem services provided by green infrastructure, particularly for urban heat island (UHI) mitigation.

By Htet Yamin Ko Ko
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Bidirectional Multimodal Fusion of Sky Images and Time-Series for Solar Forecasting with Large Language Models

The paper introduces SolCloudLLM, a large language model–based framework that fuses sky‑image patches with time‑series data through bidirectional multimodal fusion for short‑term solar forecasting. Experiments on the SIRTA and SKIPP'D datasets show that SolCloudLLM outperforms existing baselines, achieving up to a 25.4% reduction in mean squared error, especially under cloudy conditions and in few‑shot scenarios.

By Ken Chen, Maneesha Perera, Wei Wang, Sachith Seneviratne, Hansani Weeratunge, Saman Halgamuge
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

Towards Automated Solar Panel Integrity: Hybrid Deep Feature Extraction for Advanced Surface Defect Identification

The paper proposes a hybrid approach for detecting surface defects on solar panels by combining handcrafted features—Local Binary Pattern, Histogram of Gradients, and Gabor Filters—with deep features extracted from DenseNet‑169. The concatenated feature set is classified using SVM, XGBoost, and LGBM, with the DenseNet‑169 + Gabor (SVM) configuration achieving the highest accuracy of 99.17% on an augmented dataset. This method aims to provide an automated, accurate, and flexible defect‑detection system for large‑scale, remote solar power plants.

By Muhammad Junaid Asif, Muhammad Saad Rafaqat, Usman Nazakat, Uzair Khan, Rana Fayyaz Ahmad
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

PROSWIN: Probabilistic Solar Wind Speed Forecasting Using Deep Distributional Regression From Solar Images

PROSWIN is a probabilistic machine learning model that forecasts hourly solar wind speed at Earth up to four days ahead, using solar images and magnetograms processed by a deep neural network and distributional regression. It introduces a prediction score metric that rewards both timeline and high‑speed solar wind peak accuracy, achieving well‑calibrated uncertainties and superior performance on 14 years of data compared to existing models. The study highlights the importance of the 171 Å channel and demonstrates that probabilistic forecasts outperform single‑value models for both overall timelines and peak events.

By Daniel Collin, Yuri Shprits, Luca Chiarabini, Stefan J. Hofmeister, Nadja Klein, Guillermo Gallego
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Ensemble Complexity in Photovoltaic Forecasting

arXiv:2609.15049v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An ensemble can improve photovoltaic forecasts while adding components that contribute little or increase computation. We assess these effects throug...

By Sun Ze, Zhou Liguo, Xu Yuqing, Yu Lei, Jiang Mingming