Geolocating a random island using geometry and CUDA programming
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A programmer geolocated a resort island using CUDA, geometry, and open geodata instead of reverse image search.
The author solved an OSINT challenge to identify a resort island from a drone photo. They built a geometric fingerprint of three islands from pixel coordinates, then searched 80.7 million candidate triangles from OpenStreetMap land polygons using CUDA on an RTX 3050. Filters included tropical latitude band, local density, clustering, shape compactness, oval fill ratio, NDVI vegetation index, and elevation checks against Copernicus DEM. The final match was Oan Resort in the Federated States of Micronesia (7.36344°N, 151.75575°E), with the camera facing northwest. The kernel processed 80.7 million triples in 204.1 ms.
What commenters are saying
Commenters praised the writeup as impressive and a return to human-written technical content. Several noted parallels to military TERCOM navigation and Mars 2020 landing systems. One commenter pointed out Micronesia is a country (Federated States of Micronesia). The author clarified they used LLMs to refine code but wrote the blog by hand. Others suggested the method could be improved with tide data and better halo checks, and noted OSM data generalization limits fine shape analysis.