GlobalBuildingAtlas

Introduction

In this project, we provide the level of detail 1 (LoD1) data of buildings across the globe.

A overview of the dataset is illustrated bellow:

Access to the Data

Web Feature Service (WFS)

A WFS is provided so that one can access the data using other websites or GIS softwares such as QGIS and ArcGIS.

Url: https://tubvsig-so2sat-vm1.srv.mwn.de/geoserver/ows?

Web Viewer

A web interface for viewing the data is available at: website

Full Data Download

The full data can be downloaded from mediaTUM

Development Code

Global Building Polygon Generation using Satellite Data (Sec. 4.3)

For codes related to building map extraction, regularization, polygonization, and simplification, i.e., generating building polygons from satellite images (Sec. 4.3.2, Sec. 4.3.3, and Sec. 4.3.4), please refer to ./im2bf.

Global Building Height Estimation (Sec. 4.4)

1. For codes related to monocular height estimation using HTC-DC Net (Sec. 4.4.2), please refer to ./im2bh.
2. For codes related to the global inference and uncertainty quantification (Sec. 4.4.3), please refer to ./infer_height

Global LoD1 Building Model Generation (Sec. 4.5)

1. For codes related to quality-guided building polygon fusion (Sec. 4.5.1), please refer to ./fuse_bf.
2. For codes related to LoD1 building model generation (Sec. 4.5.2), please refer to ./make_lod1.

Visualization Code

For codes to reproduce the plots in the manuscript, please refer to ./make_plots.

Code License

MIT with Commons Clause (no commercial use allowed). See LICENSE.

How to cite

If you find this dataset helpful in your work, please cite the following paper.

@Article{essd-17-6647-2025,
AUTHOR = {Zhu, X. X. and Chen, S. and Zhang, F. and Shi, Y. and Wang, Y.},
TITLE = {GlobalBuildingAtlas: an open global and complete dataset of building polygons, heights and LoD1 3D models},
JOURNAL = {Earth System Science Data},
VOLUME = {17},
YEAR = {2025},
NUMBER = {12},
PAGES = {6647--6668},
URL = {https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/17/6647/2025/},
DOI = {10.5194/essd-17-6647-2025}
}