Signal from Space: Detecting Schools and Towers to Bridge the Digital Divide
Reliable internet access is essential for modern education, yet millions of school-aged children especially in developing regions remain offline due to unconnected schools. The Giga Initiative aims to connect every school to the internet, but doing so at scale requires efficient methods to map schools and assess surrounding connectivity infrastructure without relying on sparse or noisy third-party datasets. In this work, we propose a scalable, vision-only framework that uses high-resolution satellite imagery and transfer learning to address both tasks simultaneously. By adapting pre-trained object detection models to new geographical regions with minimal labeled data, we detect schools an...
| Authors | Zakarya Elmimouni, Sandor Farkas, Fares Fourati et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 2 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 July 2026 |
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