Show HN: Detect any object in satellite imagery using a text prompt (useful-ai-tools.com)

22 points by eyasu6464 ↗ HN
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.

6 comments

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