Satellite-based house roof detection and measurement solution

Proekspert develops remote sensing solutions to detect and measure building roofs to get difficult roof measures easily.

Using remote sensing for roof measurements reduces costs and time significantly compared to traditional measuring methods.

About THOR

The main objective of the Roof Solar Panel Calculator (a.k.a. THOR – Tellurian Holistic Object Recognition) is to automate the process of selecting a building’s roof as a candidate for the installation of solar panels or integrated solar roofs and to estimate associated costs. Before making an investment decision for the installation of roof-mounted solar panels, homeowners are normally interested in the cost and return on investment. Until now, this process has been slow and not user-friendly.

The process normally involves the following steps:

Since the process is manual, it is expensive and time consuming. This results in customers discontinuing the process and the manufacturer losing a potential sale.

THOR mitigates this problem by making roof information available to homeowners and solar roof providers with just a few clicks in a web application.

Added Value from Space Technology

THOR uses satellite images to identify buildings and calculate roof face size. By using satellite images, the system can be applied quickly to any country or region in the world. With other techniques (e.g., LIDAR), accessibility of raw data varies between countries and regions, meaning data is not universally available. Satellite images are becoming universally available for entire world and are available at relatively low cost. Depending on the level of desired accuracy, it is possible to use cheaper- and lower-quality images to reduce the costs of data sets.

Key features

How it works

THOR offers a way to automatically generate information about:

With quick and timely information provided by THOR, it is easy to calculate both investment size and return on investment.

In principle, THOR is scalable for worldwide use since we use publicly available satellite imagery as a basis for analysis and calculations. Initially, the service and resulting data is available for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Scandinavia. Data may be prepared and calculated for other regions upon request.