I built a browser-based tool for detecting objects in satellite imagery using vision-language models (VLMs). You draw a polygon on the map and enter a text prompt such as "swimming pools", "oil tanks", or "buses". The system scans the selected area tile-by-tile and returns detections projected back onto the map as GeoJSON.

Pipeline: select area and zoom level, split the region into mercantile tiles, run each tile with the prompt through a VLM, convert predicted bounding boxes to geographic coordinates (WGS84), and render the results back on the map.

It works reasonably well for distinct structures in a zero-shot setting. occluded objects are still better handled by specialized detectors like YOLO models.

There is a public demo and no login required. I am mainly interested in feedback on detection quality, performance tradeoffs between VLMs and specialized detectors, and potential real-world use cases.

Great idea, almost impossible to use on the mobile due to the mobile UI.

Thanks for the feedback. I’ve resolved the UI issues on mobile.

This is cool. I'll give it a go