Awesome Remote Sensing

January 18, 2026 · View on GitHub

Remote Sensing is a very exciting field full of potential. This is a curated list of awesome open-source and openly accessible remote sensing resources, tools, and datasets.

Last updated: 2026-01_18

Table of Contents

Introduction & Portals

  • NASA Worldview – Interactive browsing of global, full-resolution satellite imagery. [web:9]
  • Sentinel Hub EO Browser – Easy-to-use interface for Sentinel, Landsat, and MODIS (free tier for many EO use cases). [web:9]
  • Google Earth Engine – Multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with planetary-scale analysis capabilities (free for research and non-commercial use). [web:9]
  • Earth as Art – Curated artistic satellite imagery from USGS. [web:9]

Cloud-Native Geospatial

The modern workflow focused on accessing data without downloading large files.

Tools & Libraries

  • QGIS – Leading open-source desktop GIS. [web:9]
  • leafmap – Python package for interactive mapping and geospatial analysis. [web:9]
  • geemap – Interactive mapping with Google Earth Engine in Python. [web:9]
  • GDAL – The “Swiss army knife” for geospatial data translation. [web:9]
  • Orfeo Toolbox (OTB) – High-performance remote sensing image processing library. [web:9]
  • rioxarray – Geospatial xarray extension powered by rasterio. [web:9]
  • TorchGeo – PyTorch domain library providing datasets, samplers, and transforms for geospatial data. [web:13]
  • RSGISLib – Python library focused on raster remote sensing processing and analysis. [web:37]
  • xarray-spatial – Fast raster-based spatial analytics built on xarray, Numba and Dask. [web:50][web:54]
  • cuSpatial / libcuspatial – GPU-accelerated C++/CUDA library for vector geospatial operations in the RAPIDS ecosystem (open source). [web:48][web:56]

High-performance & Rust

  • GeoRust – Ecosystem of geospatial tools and libraries written in Rust (geometry, projections, I/O, etc.). [web:46][web:51]
  • awesome-georust – Curated list of geospatial software and libraries in Rust. [web:47]
  • gdal (Rust bindings) – Idiomatic Rust wrapper around GDAL for rasters, vectors and spatial references. [web:49][web:57]
  • gdal-sys – Low-level GDAL FFI bindings for building custom high-performance Rust tools. [web:53]

Deep Learning & Computer Vision

  • TorchGeo – Deep learning with geospatial data (datasets, samplers, transforms). [web:13]
  • segment-geospatial / samgeo – Tools to apply Segment Anything to geospatial data with good docs and examples. [web:26]
  • Clay Foundation Model – Open-source foundation model for Earth, providing EO embeddings for downstream tasks. [web:21][web:27]
  • Solaris – Pipeline for deep learning on satellite imagery. [web:9]
  • DeepForest – Python package for tree crown detection in airborne RGB imagery. [web:9]

Foundation Models & Vision-Language