Satellites auto detect buildings in OpenStreetMap
We won first place in the NGA Maps Actually Hackathon this weekend. We analyzed thousands of satellite images to automatically detect missing buildings in OpenStreetMap (OSM).
We pulled European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 imagery from Astro Digital then analyzed the images to detect areas that look like buildings. We overlay these suspects with OSM buildings layer to find buildings that are not labeled in OSM. The green buildings are existing structures captured in OpenStreetMap. The red buildings are the ones we detected as missing from the map. If a new office complex goes up in Austin, Texas or a new housing development in Karachi, Pakistan that physical development needs to be captured in the map. OpenStreetMap is the Wikipedia of maps. It’s a map built by a community of over 1 million contributors including the teams at Mapbox, Craig’s List, and HERE We Go (formerly Nokia HERE but at this point everyone is just calling it Navteq again…).