The integration of solar technology in the built environment is realized mainly through rooftop-installed panels. In this paper, we leverage state-of-the-art Machine Learning and computer vision techniques applied on overhead images to provide a geo-localization of the available rooftop surfaces for solar panel installation. We further exploit a 3D building database to associate them to the corresponding roof geometries by means of a geospatial post-processing approach. The stand-alone Convolutional Neural Network used to segment suitable rooftop areas reaches an intersection over union of 64% and an accuracy of 93%, while a post-processing step using building database improves the rejection of false positives. The model is applied to a case study area in the canton of Geneva and the results are compared with another recent method used in the literature to derive the realistic available area.
Learning behavioral patterns from observational data has been a de-facto approach to motion forecasting. Yet, the current paradigm suffers from two shortcomings: brittle under covariate shift and inefficient for knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose to address these challenges from a causal representation perspective. We first introduce a causal formalism of motion forecasting, which casts the problem as a dynamic process with three groups of latent variables, namely invariant mechanisms, style confounders, and spurious features. We then introduce a learning framework that treats each group separately: (i) unlike the common practice of merging datasets collected from different locations, we exploit their subtle distinctions by means of an invariance loss encouraging the model to suppress spurious correlations; (ii) we devise a modular architecture that factorizes the representations of invariant mechanisms and style confounders to approximate a causal graph; (iii) we introduce a style consistency loss that not only enforces the structure of style representations but also serves as a selfsupervisory signal for test-time refinement on the fly. Experiment results on synthetic and real datasets show that our three proposed components significantly improve the robustness and reusability of the learned motion representations, outperforming prior state-of-the-art motion forecasting models for out-of-distribution generalization and lowshot transfer.
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