28–29 Jan 2025
Instituto Superior Técnico - Campus Alameda
Europe/Lisbon timezone

YOLO Application on Portuguese Highways for Photovoltaic Energy Potential Evaluation

28 Jan 2025, 12:12
12m
Anfiteatro PA1 (Instituto Superior Técnico - Campus Alameda)

Anfiteatro PA1

Instituto Superior Técnico - Campus Alameda

Av. Rovisco Pais 1, 1049-001 Lisboa

Speaker

João Tavares (Instituto Superior Técnico)

Description

The world is facing an urgent challenge: the need for sustainable and clean energy solutions. Highways, with their vast and underutilised infrastructure, present an innovative opportunity through the integration of photovoltaic panels.

In this work, I employed YOLO, a state-of-the-art computer vision algorithm, to automatically detect and identify highway structures and evaluate their potential for solar energy generation. As a first step in detecting sound barriers, I applied data augmentation techniques to artificially expand my dataset, which was then used to train a YOLOv10n model. The model achieved impressive results, with a precision of 86%, a recall of 89%, and a mean average precision (mAP) of 91%, which demonstrates strong performance and highlight the effectiveness of this approach.

This research contributes to the development of smarter and greener highways.

Author

João Tavares (Instituto Superior Técnico)

Presentation materials