I built a browser-based tool that uses Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to detect objects in satellite imagery via natural language prompts. Draw a polygon on the map, type what you want to find (e.g., "swimming pools," "oil tanks," "solar panels"), and the system scans tile-by-tile, projecting bounding boxes back onto the globe as GeoJSON.

The pipeline: pick zoom level + prompt → slice map into mercantile tiles → feed each tile + prompt to VLM → create bounding boxes → project to WGS84 coordinates → render on map.

No login required for the demo. Works well for distinct structures zero-shot; struggles with dense/occluded objects where narrow YOLO models still win.

Find me large outcroppings of gold, or gold particles in tree canopies please

Dupe yesterday with ~50 points and ~20 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47305979

Neat. I was recently wondering if there was a way to find houses in my area that had roof-top solar, just to get an idea of how common it was.

Since this post is a dupe, here's a video demonstrating a similar but different app I made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjH0kMEz4YY

did you just make Danti?