nyandwi / playing-with-open-building

Playing with Open Buildings dataset. Dataset available here: https://sites.research.google/open-buildings/

Playing with Open Buildings Dataset

Open Buildings is a large scale dataset that contains the outlines(or segmentation maps) of buildings that are extracted from the satellite images in Africa(64% of the continent).

The dataset contains 516M buildings maps. Quoting the dataset homepage, "for each building in this dataset we include the polygon describing its footprint on the ground, a confidence score indicating how sure we are that this is a building, and a Plus Code corresponding to the centre of the building. There is no information about the type of building, its street address, or any details other than its geometry."

The dataset can be used for:

• Estimating the population density(number of people per unit area) that can potentially facilitate planning and statistics(estimates).
• To predict the number of affected buildings caused by natural disasters(floods, drought) in a given area.

• Facilitating digital systems/services in areas that don't have recognized street addresses such as PlusCode(I didn't know that I have a free code that holds my location until learning about this data)!

• The dataset can also assist national activities that require knowledge of pupulation density and settlement density or infrastructure usage such as vaccination plannings, mosquito-net distribution, school and health centres, transportations, etc..More about those use-cases here.

Quick Links/Further Reading:

• Dataset Home
• Continental-Scale Building Detection from High Resolution Satellite Imagery
• Colab notebook

To do:

• Play with the data
• Read the dataset release paper
• Think about other use-cases?

W. Sirko, S. Kashubin, M. Ritter, A. Annkah, Y.S.E. Bouchareb, Y. Dauphin, D. Keysers, M. Neumann, M. Cisse, J.A. Quinn. 
Continental-scale building detection from high resolution satellite imagery.
arXiv:2107.12283, 2021.