"These images of roofs with and without asbestos can be used to train the neural network to predict outcomes on roofs it is yet to see.
They did this by creating a neural network (a deep learning model) able to identify, with a success rate of around 80%, whether a roof has asbestos based on an aerial image of the roof. "These images of roofs with and without asbestos can be used to train the neural network to predict outcomes on roofs it is yet to see. The network learns to identify the typical visual patterns of roofs that have asbestos (based on certain colours or textures, for example) and can then learn to classify (with or without asbestos) roofs it has never seen before," says Lapedriza.