Stanford's Tempov Model Estimates Village Wealth from Satellite Imagery with 87% Accuracy

anselm · x · 2026-08-23

Stanford researchers released Tempov, a foundation model trained on three million pairs of Landsat images. It predicts asset wealth at the village level using raw satellite imagery (six spectral bands), updating in near real-time without census data or field surveys. The model explains 87% of household wealth variation in Malawi and 74% in Mozambique. Unlike existing models that predict static snapshots, Tempov focuses on tracking how wealth changes over time.

Original post →

More from Research

Research channel →