A fully portable machine vision tool for estimating canopy cover from photos using sky segmentation.
Canopticon analyzes photos you send it to estimate the percentage of sky visible through a forest canopy. It uses image segmentation to identify sky pixels to deliver a cover ratio.
High Reliability Sky Analysis
Portable
Canopticon lives in a box; bring it to the field and fire its onboard camera directly or upload images straight from your phone.
On boot Canopticon displays a QR code to connect to its own local wifi. No internet required.
Once connected, browse to “sky.local” or simply scan the second QR code once it noticed you joined.
Automapping
Modern phones store GPS info in photo metadata, Canopticon detects this and plots the image on a map fully local to the device so it can serve it while offline.
Canopy cover is tallied for photos per area and the region is shaded according to the amount of cover, providing at-a-glance coverage info without any manual input.
Features
- Photo-based canopy analysis from field images or uploads
- On-device sky segmentation with coverage percentage output
- Annotated overlays for quick visual verification
- Fully offline workflow over the device’s local wifi network
- Portable enclosure with onboard camera capture
- Automatic geotag plotting and area-based canopy mapping
- Mobile-first simple workflow for use in the field
Why?
Older canopy estimation workflows often rely on shaky thresholding and color heuristics which break down in uneven lighting, dense foliage, high-contrast scenes, or even just during dusk hours.
Canopticon replaces that guesswork with an on-device segmentation pipeline that isolates sky pixels more reliably, producing cleaner overlays and more trustworthy coverage estimates without requiring a network connection.