Earth observation, 2026
KilnWatch
Finds brick kilns across Bangladesh in satellite imagery, then screens each for the rules it looks to be breaking.
- Role
- Contributor
- Type
- Earth observation, 2026
- Status
- Live
- Problem
Illegal brick kilns are a serious air quality problem in Bangladesh and the enforcement bottleneck is not the law, it is knowing where they are. Finding them by inspection means driving to them.
- What we built
Detection and legality are deliberately kept apart. Computer vision finds the kiln, an ensemble of a rotated-box YOLO11, an RT-DETR validator and a ViT context reviewer, working on 128px Sentinel-2 tiles at roughly 10m resolution. A separate rule engine then screens each detection against the measurable parts of the Brick Kilns Act 2013, on location, technology and land use. What needs a human or a government record to confirm is marked as needing one rather than asserted.
- How it works
- 1Sentinel-2 tiles, 128px at about 10m
- 2YOLO11-OBB finds the kiln
- 3RT-DETR validates, ViT reviews context
- 4Rule engine screens against the Brick Kilns Act 2013
- 5Flagged, or marked as needing a human to confirm
- Result
Deployed and openable, with 50 georeferenced signals across five priority districts, real TFLite inference behind a Live AI mode, and an A4 evidence brief generated in the browser.
- Stack
Next.js, YOLO11-OBB, TFLite, MapLibre, Sentinel-2