Apply for community grant: Academic project (gpu and storage)
Empowering Citizen-Led Urban Forest Conservation in Pune, India
Hello Hugging Face Team,
This project is the backend for a free, open-source web application designed to empower citizen volunteers in their fight to protect urban forests.
You can see the live application here: https://tree-measurement-frontend.vercel.app/
In the city of Pune, India, organizations like SamaajData, Reap Benefit, Farmers for Forest, and Warrior Moms are working tirelessly to conduct a census of public trees. This is a direct response to the ongoing removal of vital urban greenery. Our application was built to solve their problem, allowing a volunteer to take a single photo of a tree and get back its vital statistics and an estimate of its sequestered CO2.
We have successfully deployed a functional prototype on the free CPU tier. However, we have hit a critical performance wall. The processing time for a single tree is over 60 seconds.
I have recorded a short video to demonstrate this exact problem: https://youtu.be/4F6Sz-YIti8
As you can see, this delay makes the application impractical for field use and severely hampers the conservation efforts of the volunteers who need a fast, responsive tool. For a census of thousands of trees, this is a major bottleneck.
A GPU would be transformative. It would reduce the processing time from a minute to just a few seconds per tree. Based on your available hardware, the Nvidia T4 small would be the perfect solution. It is the industry standard for efficient AI inference and provides more than enough power to create a truly interactive experience for our users.
Finally, we also request persistent storage. The current free tier hibernates after 48 hours, forcing a slow 2.5GB model re-download on every cold start. For volunteers who need immediate access, this delay is a significant barrier. Persistent storage would ensure the tool is always ready to go.
By granting these resources, you would be directly empowering on-the-ground environmental activism and providing a critical tool to community organizations working to preserve their urban ecosystem.
Thank you for your consideration.