Microsoft releases 18M building footprints in Africa

Under Microsoft’s AI for Humanitarian Action program, Bing Maps together with Microsoft Philanthropies is partnering with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMapTeam on an initiative to bring AI Assistance as a resource in open map building. The initiative focuses on incorporating design updates, integrating machine learning, and bringing new open building datasets into Tasking Manager.

The Bing Maps team has been harnessing the power of Computer Vision to identify map features at scale. Building upon their work in the United States and Canada, Bing Maps is now releasing country-wide open building footprints datasets in Uganda and Tanzania. This will be one of the first open building datasets in Africa and will be available for use within OpenStreetMap (OSM).

The Bing Maps team will be making the data available on Github to download. The CNTK toolkit developed by Microsoft is open source and available on GitHub as well. The ResNet3 model is also open source and available on GitHub. The Bing Maps computer vision team will be presenting the work in Uganda and Tanzania at the annual International State of the Map conference in Heidelberg, Germany and at the HOT Summit.