Capture and detection
Tools that turn photos, scans, recordings and imagery into data.
Tools that read what a camera or a scanner recorded of a place and name what they find. Detectors find animals in camera-trap pictures and fish in reef video. Classifiers mark flooded ground or damaged buildings in satellite scenes. Reconstruction models build point clouds and surfaces from a phone video or a drone flight. Many are open models a person can run on their own pictures; each entry says what goes in and what comes out.
3D capture and reconstruction
Open-source photogrammetry pipeline from CNES that builds digital surface models, rasters of ground and rooftop height, from two or more satellite images of the same place.
Cities & places open sourcepartly open dataopen participation
Open-source pipeline from EPFL's ECEO lab that builds labelled 3D point clouds, orthomosaics and benthic cover statistics of coral reefs from handheld underwater video.
Living systemsWater open source
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Research model from Seoul National University that generates a town-scale 3D scene from a single image, built on Microsoft's TRELLIS; code released with a CVPR 2026 paper.
Cities & places open source
Open-source streaming 3D reconstruction model from the Robbyant team at Ant Group that estimates camera poses, depth and point clouds from a video or image sequence in one feed-forward pass.
Cities & places open source
Hosted mapping and visual positioning service from MultiSet AI that builds a localisation map from one drone flight over a site, for drones, phones, headsets and robots to query for their position.
Cities & places closed sourceAPI
Feed-forward 3D vision model from Meta AI and Oxford's Visual Geometry Group that predicts camera poses, depth and point clouds from video; used as a reconstruction backend in DeepReefMap for coral reef mapping.
Cities & places partly open source
Wildflow's service for coral reefs: divers upload footage and get back georeferenced 3D models, orthomosaics and bathymetry for tracking a reef over time.
Living systems open sourcepartly open data
Mapping change from imagery
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Open flood detection model from the Microsoft AI for Good Lab that compares Sentinel-1 radar images from before and during a flood, with a global record of detected floods from October 2014 to September 2024.
WaterCities & places open sourceopen datano APIopen participation
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Earth Genome's hosted search tool for satellite imagery; a user labels a few known sites and it finds similar places anywhere on Earth, for detecting mines, cattle facilities, airstrips and other land change.
Food & land closed source
Wildfire risk software from Opal AI Inc. of Marina del Rey, California, that ranks risk and recommends mitigation for utilities, fire agencies and insurers from imagery, lidar, GIS, weather and field data.
Fire closed source
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Open-source toolkit from the Microsoft AI for Good Lab for mapping damaged buildings after a disaster, from satellite or aerial images or from radar damage proxy maps.
Cities & places open sourceno APIopen participation
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Open-source Python package, also called FloodMapper, that maps flood water in Sentinel-2 and Landsat satellite images, with a hand-checked training set of past floods and trained models to download.
WaterCities & places open sourcepartly open datano APIopen participation
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Open-source tool from Google Research that finds damaged buildings in satellite images taken before and after a disaster, trained for each event on a small sample of buildings labelled by people.
Cities & places open sourceno APIopen participation
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The Amazon Conservation Team and the AARIMO network use Vantor satellite imagery to find and track illegal gold-mining dredges along the Puré River in the Colombian Amazon and pass the findings to enforcement agencies.
Living systemsPeople & society closed source
Wildlife and field monitoring
Open-source Android app from the non-profit Awana Digital for territory monitoring and mapping, co-designed with Indigenous communities; teams record observations on a map and share them peer to peer.
People & societyCities & places open sourcepartly open participation
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Open single-class fish detector built by Filippo Varini and a group of contributors, trained on seventeen open datasets pooled into one; finds fish in underwater images and video from any camera or habitat.
Living systemsWater open sourceopen dataopen participation
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Open object detector from the ConservationDronesAI group, built on RF-DETR, that finds people, mammals and vehicles in drone imagery for wildlife surveys and counts.
Living systems open source
Open-source wildlife detection models from Microsoft's AI for Good Lab, including MegaDetector for camera-trap images, and PyTorch-Wildlife, the framework that runs those models.
Living systems open sourcepartly open data
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Open-source detector from the Microsoft AI for Good Lab that finds wildlife in aerial and drone survey imagery; ships the OWL model family and extends MegaDetector from camera traps to overhead views.
Living systems open sourcepartly open data
Open-source, solar-powered edge device from Microsoft's AI for Good Lab that runs camera-trap and bioacoustic AI models on site and sends the results out by satellite or GSM, for biodiversity monitoring in remote places.
Living systems open source
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Robotic surface vehicle from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, built by Peter Traykovski and adapted for Anne Cohen's reef work, that photographs shallow coral reefs along GPS-tagged tracks so the same colonies can be rechecked after heat waves.