{"id":1191128,"date":"2026-10-26T16:27:15","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T23:27:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/anaximander-interactively-running-geospatial-deep-learning-models-on-any-compute-backend\/"},"modified":"2026-10-29T15:33:45","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T22:33:45","slug":"anaximander-interactively-running-geospatial-deep-learning-models-on-any-compute-backend","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/anaximander-interactively-running-geospatial-deep-learning-models-on-any-compute-backend\/","title":{"rendered":"Anaximander: Interactively Running Geospatial Deep Learning Models on Any Compute Backend"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Applying deep learning models to satellite imagery from within geographic information systems (GIS) remains high-friction for remote sensing practitioners. Models arrive in incompatible formats and target different compute environments, from local workstations to serverless cloud services. As a result, every evaluation demands custom deployment, tiling, and georeferencing code before a single prediction reaches the analyst&#8217;s map. This friction discourages systematic comparison in a domain where model choice directly affects operational outcomes such as field delineation, crop monitoring, and disaster response. We present Anaximander, an open-source system that unifies model source and compute location choice behind one interactive interface. The system&#8217;s backend is an inference server that loads models from multiple commonly-used sources and serves them on any accessible compute backend. The server provides session management and model caching, and streams results back per tile. The backend is paired with a QGIS plugin that drives tiling, result reassembly, georeferencing, and real-time per-tile status visualization. An additional user-interface path injects layer legends as prompts into vision-language models. We demonstrate the system in a code-free side-by-side comparison of three heterogeneous models on an agricultural field delineation task: gpt-image-1 via a cloud API, Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3) on a remote GPU, and DelineateAnything on a local CPU. The inference backend and protocol are open-source and available at https:\/\/github.com\/microsoft\/nxmndr.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Applying deep learning models to satellite imagery from within geographic information systems (GIS) remains high-friction for remote sensing practitioners. Models arrive in incompatible formats and target different compute environments, from local workstations to serverless cloud services. As a result, every evaluation demands custom deployment, tiling, and georeferencing code before a single prediction reaches the analyst&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"satej soman","user_id":0},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Akram Zaytar","user_id":"42666"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Girmaw Abebe Tadesse","user_id":"42657"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Gilles Quentin Hacheme","user_id":"42654"},{"type":"text","value":"M. S. Danish","user_id":0},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Inbal Becker-Reshef","user_id":"44153"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Rahul Dodhia","user_id":"41401"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Juan M. 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