Moondream Powerful visual AI. Tiny footprint.

What is Moondream?

Moondream is an open-source visual language model engineered to interpret and understand images via simple text prompts. Distinguished by its remarkably small size of just 1GB, it offers rapid performance and significant capability without demanding extensive infrastructure or training data. This lightweight model, featuring under 2 billion parameters and quantized to 4-bit, is designed to run efficiently on various platforms, including edge devices and personal laptops.

Developed for ease of use, Moondream simplifies complex computer vision tasks, allowing developers to integrate visual understanding into applications with minimal overhead. It supports a diverse range of functionalities beyond basic visual Q&A, encompassing image captioning, object detection, spatial location identification, document reading, and gaze detection. It can be run locally at no cost or utilized through a cloud API for handling large volumes of images affordably, making advanced visual AI accessible for various applications.

Features

Lightweight Design: Under 2B parameters, quantized to 4-bit, resulting in a 1GB model size.
High Performance: Optimized for speed, running efficiently on commodity hardware, laptops, and edge devices.
Versatile Capabilities: Supports image captioning, visual Q&A, object detection, pointing (locating), gaze detection, and OCR/document understanding.
Simple Integration: Easy to use with natural language prompts, requiring no complex training or infrastructure.
Flexible Deployment: Can be run locally for free or accessed via a scalable cloud API.
Open Source: Available for free installation and modification.

Use Cases

Generating captions for images in manufacturing or compliance documentation.
Answering visual questions for security surveillance or agentic AI systems.
Detecting objects for retail inventory management or robotics.
Locating specific items or defects in images for quality control or transportation.
Detecting operator gaze for safety analysis in manufacturing or transportation.
Extracting text and understanding documents for logistics or office automation.
Enhancing mobile applications with image understanding capabilities.
Developing robotics systems with semantic visual behaviors.