The OpenSight™ Foundation
Making the physical world visible.
Capture once. Share openly. Enhance collectively. Create value everywhere.
OpenSight is an open, public-interest initiative creating the common infrastructure for capturing, sharing, enhancing and understanding the physical world.
The problem
Between inspections, nobody knows
Public infrastructure is inspected periodically and expensively. Between inspections its condition changes and nobody knows. Meanwhile millions of ordinary vehicles already carry cameras, GPS and computing. OpenSight turns them into a distributed sensor network.
How it works
Four pillars
See / Capture
Capture the physical world with low-cost, open hardware on ordinary vehicles.
A Pi appliance and dashcam record georeferenced imagery on every drive.
Share
Make observations accessible and interoperable via open platforms, schemas and APIs.
Publishing to Mapillary and exposing data via the OpenSight Observation Schema.
Enhance
Add intelligence: computer vision, change detection, condition scoring and human review.
Detecting a pothole, then that it grew, then that it was repaired.
Create
Build value together on an open foundation.
Authority dashboards, contractor SLA tools, research datasets, commercial integrations.
Open by design
Eight values, built into the architecture
Open by default
Core technology is available to inspect, modify and reuse.
Hardware agnostic and vendor neutral
No single camera, cloud, AI model or GIS platform controls the ecosystem.
Offline first
A vehicle keeps working without connectivity.
Evidence first and human-verifiable
AI conclusions stay traceable to the underlying image and observation.
Standards based
Reuse existing geospatial and infrastructure standards before inventing new ones.
Privacy by design
Privacy zones, blurring, retention and access control are architectural, not afterthoughts.
Cloud optional
An authority can run its own storage and infrastructure.
Commercially compatible
Openness enables commercial adoption rather than preventing it.
Evidence, not guesswork
The pothole story
A pothole appears. The system detects it, then recognises when the vehicle drives past again that the pothole remains and has changed. Once it is repaired, the next observation confirms the fix.
The valuable question is not "where are the potholes?" but "what has deteriorated on this road since the last inspection?"
See more. Share more. Create more.
OpenSight is built in the open from the beginning, with authorities, contractors, researchers, technology companies and communities.