Building Footprint Extraction

Building footprints are the base layer of exposure modelling, population estimation, energy demand and cadastral work. In much of the world they either do not exist, are years out of date, or stop at the edge of whatever area someone once had mapped. This service produces them on demand, for the area and the date the customer asks for.

It works on objects rather than pixels: segment the image into coherent regions first, then classify each one as building or not. Where the imagery is coarse relative to the buildings in it, the platform’s super-resolution step sharpens it before segmentation, which is what makes footprint extraction workable on medium-resolution sources rather than only on the finest imagery, and is a route the published literature covers up to national scale.

Imagery resolution sets how much detail comes back, not whether the service works. Finer imagery separates adjoining structures and picks up small outbuildings, and turns height from a modelled estimate into a measured one; coarser imagery still yields the built form and the count. Every footprint carries a confidence value, so thin or ambiguous areas are visible as such rather than silently under-mapped, and because extraction is a job like any other it can be repeated on whatever cycle the customer needs.