Signal from Space: Detecting Schools and Towers to Bridge the Digital Divide

2026-07-02

AI Summary

This study addresses the critical challenge of limited internet access for millions of school-aged children in developing countries due to unconnected schools, necessitating efficient identification of schools and nearby telecommunications infrastructure to assess connectivity potential. The work proposes the first end-to-end visual framework that relies solely on high-resolution satellite imagery without any third-party auxiliary data. Leveraging transfer learning, the model simultaneously detects schools and communication towers under scarce annotation conditions and analyzes their spatial relationships. The approach substantially reduces dependence on sparse ground-truth labels and external datasets, demonstrating strong performance on real-world imagery from Lesotho. This methodology offers a scalable and cost-effective tool to inform prioritization of network investment in underserved regions.

Abstract

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 and cell towers directly from space. We then analyze the spatial relationship between detected schools and nearby towers as a proxy for connectivity availability. This purely imagery-driven pipeline enables large-scale infrastructure mapping, reduces dependency on auxiliary data, and supports data-driven prioritization of connectivity investments in underserved areas. Our approach is demonstrated on real satellite imagery from Lesotho, showing strong performance across this region.

Problem

• school detection
• cell tower detection
• digital divide
• satellite imagery
• connectivity assessment

Innovation

• satellite imagery
• transfer learning
• object detection
• digital divide
• infrastructure mapping