USBuildingFootprints
A dataset of 129.6 million computer-generated building footprint polygons for the United States, derived from satellite imagery.
What is USBuildingFootprints?
Microsoft USBuildingFootprints is a large-scale open dataset of building outlines for the entire United States. It solves the problem of manually mapping millions of structures by using computer vision on satellite imagery to automatically generate accurate polygon footprints. This provides a foundational geospatial layer for mapping, urban planning, and analysis.
Geospatial developers, data scientists, urban planners, OpenStreetMap contributors, and anyone needing a comprehensive building footprint dataset for the United States.
Developers choose this dataset because it offers a massive, ready-to-use collection of building footprints with verified high quality, saving immense manual digitization effort. Its open license and integration potential with tools like OpenStreetMap's RapiD and AI-assisted Tasking Manager provide immediate utility.
Overview
Computer generated building footprints for the United States
Use Cases
Best For
- Populating base maps and geographic information systems (GIS) with building data
- Accelerating OpenStreetMap imports and contributions with AI-assisted mapping
- Conducting urban planning and development analysis at a national scale
- Training and benchmarking machine learning models for building detection
- Performing demographic or infrastructure studies that require building locations
- Creating visualizations and applications that display US building density
Not Ideal For
- Projects requiring building footprints for countries outside the United States
- Applications needing real-time or very recent building data, as parts of the dataset are from imagery averaging 2012
- Teams with limited storage or computational resources, due to large file sizes (e.g., multi-gigabyte state downloads)
- Use cases demanding guaranteed, uniform accuracy across all regions without manual local verification
Pros & Cons
Pros
Includes 129,591,852 building footprints across all 50 states and D.C., providing a nationwide dataset in standard GeoJSON format, as detailed in the download links.
Achieves 98.5% precision and 92.4% recall, with metrics showing quality often matches or exceeds hand-drawn OpenStreetMap data, based on polygon evaluation in the FAQ.
Released under the ODbL license, allowing free use and modification for both commercial and non-commercial purposes, as stated in the license section.
Directly supported in tools like the AI-assisted Tasking Manager and Facebook's RapiD, facilitating OpenStreetMap contributions, as mentioned in the FAQ.
Cons
Only 73 million footprints in the focal region are from 2019-2020 imagery; the rest average from 2012, making parts of the dataset outdated for time-sensitive applications.
The README explicitly warns that data quality varies by geography (e.g., rural vs. urban), necessitating local inspections before critical use, which adds overhead.
Unzipped files range up to 3.35 GiB per state, requiring significant storage and processing power, as shown in the download table, which can be prohibitive for some setups.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Projects
National Structures InventoryA dataset intended to provide access to consistent, and nationally available point based structure inventories with attribution to support evaluation of consequences from natural and man-made hazards
Smart Location DatabaseThe Smart Location Database is a nationwide geographic data resource for measuring location efficiency. It includes more than 90 attributes summarizing characteristics such as housing density, diversity of land use, neighborhood design, destination accessibility, transit service, employment, and demographics. Most attributes are available for every census block group in the United States
Found a gem we're missing?
Open-Awesome is built by the community, for the community. Submit a project, suggest an awesome list, or help improve the catalog on GitHub.