Microsoft has released new and updated building footprints

NOTE: An updated version of this article can be found in the Microsoft Maps Blog.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/news/microsoft-has-released-new-and-updated-building-footprints

Microsoft continues to make significant investments in deep learning, computer vision, and AI. The Microsoft Maps Team has been leveraging that investment to identify map features at scale and produce high-quality building footprint data sets with the overall goal to add to the OpenStreetMap and MissingMaps humanitarian efforts.

As of this post, the following locations are available and Microsoft offers access to this data under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL).

 
Country/Region Million buildings
United States of America 129.6
Nigeria and Kenya 50.5
South America 44.5
Uganda and Tanzania 17.9
Canada 11.8
Australia 11.3

As you might expect, the vintage of the footprints depends on the collection date of the underlying imagery. Bing Maps Imagery is a composite of multiple sources with different capture dates (ranging 2012 to 2021). To ensure we are setting the right expectation for that building, each footprint has a capture date tag associated if we could deduce the vintage of imagery used.

This picture demonstrates how an imagery update can only partly cover a location. In this case, the orange areas covering parts of the United States of America represent a fairly large set of data that would have been collected on clear days without cloud cover or other weather that might obstruct the view to the ground below.

building footprint data on USA map

Imagery locations for USA Building Footprint updates

To find out more about Microsoft Maps Open Source projects, like these building footprint data sets, check out our website at Open Source – Bing Maps (microsoft.com)

Learn more about building footprints with Bing Maps API.