CLAY / IGN

Quarry search with Clay

EXPERIMENTAL

Search IGN aerial imagery with Clay embeddings, then compare candidate quarry sites with the ICPE registry and OpenStreetMap.

Unmatched candidates are leads for human inspection. They are not evidence of non-compliance. Nationwide coverage remains a possible extension.

Quarry search workflow using IGN imagery, Clay embeddings and reference registries — The workflow describes the project detector. The small quarry insets show a separate Clay similarity example on real IGN data, not classifier probabilities or a validation result.

Imagery, embeddings and review

Frozen Clay v1.5 embeddings provide whole-tile context and local patch information. A small classifier combines them to rank candidate sites for inspection.

The current work covers indexed areas in PACA and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. The reference lists have gaps too, so a missing match needs human review.

Illustration: Dardennes quarry. IGN BD ORTHO, Licence Ouverte 2.0. Retrieved 7 September 2026. Reference mapping: © OpenStreetMap contributors.