I am incredibly excited to announce the launch of the Open Buildings 2.5D Temporal Dataset open-sourcing annual data about building presence and heights across the Global South from 2016-2023.
This dataset is the result of a research breakthrough that enabled us to extract building heights and footprints from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite mission, much lower-resolution imagery than before. Now, using AI, we are able to leverage stacks of these images to generate super-resolved, fresh and temporally consistent building data (and heights!) from imagery that is very blurry to the human eye.
Credits: The team in Google Research who carried out this work and made the public release possible includes Wojciech Sirko, Krishna Sapkota, Juliana T. C. Marcos, Abigail Annkah, Olivia Graham, Emmanuel Asiedu Brempong, Abel Korme, Mohammed Alewi Hassen, Sella Nevo, Tomer Shekel, Abdoulaye Diack, and me.