Detect any object in satellite imagery using a text prompt
Details
- External ID
- 47297308
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Detect any object in satellite imagery using a text prompt
- Website domain
- useful-ai-tools.com
- Launched
- March 8, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 22
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7570725707257072
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- ai image prompts and developer tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Search & retrieval
- Audience
- B2B
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- text-based object detection in satellite imagery
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It combines standard web mapping libraries with an existing Vision-Language Model or zero-shot object detection API running on sliced map tile images.
Discussion
7 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Danti
Concerns raised: Repeated submissions appearing as dishonest marketing strategy, Duplicate posting (posted yesterday with engagement)
Feature requests: Identify houses with rooftop solar installations
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 33 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #8 of 34 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 128 days after the earliest competitor.
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- geo-sleuth · github · 2026-09-18 · 270 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- delta-fishing-assistant · github · 2026-09-12 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- World Explorer · ph · 2026-09-22 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- scan2mesh · github · 2026-09-15 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.36
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.