Mapping electricity infrastructure with deep learning

Information on the location of grid infrastructure is difficult to get, but important for identifying optimal strategies for providing electricity access to communities without such access. A 2018-19 Bass Connections team: Wendell Cathcart (MEM '19), Ben Alexander (T '20), Atsushi Hu (T '21), Varun Nair (T '20), and Lin Zuo (T '20) worked to fill this important information gap by training deep machine learning models to automatically detect grid infrastructure in aerial imagery. In this presentation, the team's five students discuss the context for their work and describe the process of refining their object-detection algorithm. Faculty Advisors: Dr. Kyle Bradbury & Dr. Leslie Collins.