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SCHMEAR: scalable construction of holistic models for energy analysis from rooftops

Published: 17 November 2021 Publication History

Abstract

As the world moves to decarbonize, the built environment commands attention for its intensity of energy consumption. Potential pathways for decarbonizing the built environment can be discovered through the aid of building energy modeling, which helps identify potential retrofit strategies and simulate integration with renewable energy sources. Energy modeling is complicated however, due to compound interactions between building materials, structural design, and urban form. Significant domain knowledge, modeling expertise, and extensive time investment are required for accurate modeling to accommodate this complexity. In this work, we explore the potential of accurately modeling building energy consumption at scale through the application of modern computer vision algorithms. We demonstrate that our computer vision system can accurately predict energy consumption through the extraction of meaningful features contained in satellite imagery. To accomplish this, we introduce a data-collection pipeline and a computer vision architecture to process satellite photos and contextual information from the urban texture. We also demonstrate a method of comparing the relative significance of the automatically extracted features in informing building decarbonization decision making and policy. Our results indicate that this approach reveals valuable insights into the dynamics of building energy consumption on the city scale and enables the rapid analysis of urban energy dynamics with readily available data.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Benchmarking Domestic Energy Consumption using High-Resolution Neighbourhood Energy Data and City Clustering in the UKProceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation10.1145/3671127.3698183(121-131)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2024
  • (2023)Taking the Long View: Enhancing Learning On Multi-Temporal, High-Resolution, and Disparate Remote Sensing DataProceedings of the 10th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation10.1145/3600100.3623722(11-20)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023

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cover image ACM Conferences
BuildSys '21: Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation
November 2021
388 pages
ISBN:9781450391146
DOI:10.1145/3486611
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 17 November 2021

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Author Tags

  1. building energy modelling
  2. computer vision
  3. convolutional neural network
  4. feature extraction

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BuildSys '21 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 107 submissions, 26%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 148 of 500 submissions, 30%

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View all
  • (2024)Benchmarking Domestic Energy Consumption using High-Resolution Neighbourhood Energy Data and City Clustering in the UKProceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation10.1145/3671127.3698183(121-131)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2024
  • (2023)Taking the Long View: Enhancing Learning On Multi-Temporal, High-Resolution, and Disparate Remote Sensing DataProceedings of the 10th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation10.1145/3600100.3623722(11-20)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023

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