🛰️ Solar Plants Brazil

Solar Plants Brazil is a geospatial dataset for binary semantic segmentation of photovoltaic (PV) solar power stations in satellite imagery. It consists of multi-spectral image tiles (including near-infrared) with pixel-level annotations indicating the presence of solar panels. This dataset enables training and evaluating deep learning models that automatically detect solar farm installations from overhead imagery, supporting applications in renewable energy mapping and remote sensing.

Dataset Overview

Purpose: Identify photovoltaic solar plant locations via binary segmentation (panel vs. background) in satellite images
Imagery: 4-band (RGB + Near-Infrared) GeoTIFF tiles at 256×256 pixels each (float32 pixel values)
Labels: Corresponding binary mask for each image (1 = solar panel, 0 = no panel)
Volume: 272 image/mask pairs in total, split into training, validation, and test sets (201 train, 35 val, 36 test)
Geography: Tiles are from various locations across Brazil, focusing on known solar farm sites
Metadata: GeoTIFF files include spatial reference (CRS) and geolocation

📁 Dataset Structure

solar-plants-brazil/
├── train/
│   ├── input/       # 256x256 RGBNIR images (GeoTIFF)
│   └── labels/      # 256x256 binary masks (GeoTIFF)
├── val/
│   ├── input/ 
│   └── labels/
└── test/
    ├── input/
    └── labels/

Each image is named img(<ID>).tif with its corresponding mask target(<ID>).tif. All images are pre-cropped to 256×256 pixels. The masks are binary, with 1 representing solar panels.

🔧 TorchGeo Integration

This dataset is integrated with the TorchGeo library and can be loaded as:

from torchgeo.datasets import SolarPlantsBrazil

dataset = SolarPlantsBrazil(split="train", root="data/", download=True)
sample = dataset[0]
image_tensor, mask_tensor = sample["image"], sample["mask"]
print(image_tensor.shape, mask_tensor.shape)

This returns image tensors with 4 channels and single-channel binary masks.

💡 Use Cases

Training segmentation models for solar farm detection
Monitoring solar plant growth over time
Infrastructure planning and spatial analytics
Academic research on geospatial ML

📚 Related Resources

License

This dataset is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

📜 Citation

@misc{solarplantsbrazil2024,
  author       = {Federico Bessi},
  title        = {Solar Plants Brazil: A Semantic Segmentation Dataset for Photovoltaic Panel Detection},
  year         = {2024},
  howpublished = {Hugging Face Datasets},
  url          = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/FederCO23/solar-plants-brazil},
  note         = {Preprocessing and training code available at https://github.com/FederCO23/UCSD_MLBootcamp_Capstone}
}

🙋‍♂️ Contact

Creator: Federico Bessi
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/federico-bessi