Extracting Building Footprints

[Kevin McCartney]

I'm looking for software that will expedite extracting building footprints from UAS imagery. Consider the case of flying a dense urban area and generating a GIS feature class of polygons representing the areas covered by buildings.

Have you used an application or cloud service that expedites this process? If so, which one and would you recommend it?

From what I'm seeing, most current offerings (12/9/24) are geared towards manually measuring areas and volumes.

I did find this use case discussed as a method for ArcGIS API for Python. I imagine an application does/will do this en masse.
Extracting Building Footprints From Drone Data | ArcGIS API for Python

Thanks in advance!

 

[z84ixlmd4]

I'm looking for software that will expedite extracting building footprints from UAS imagery. Consider the case of flying a dense urban area and generating a GIS feature class of polygons representing the areas covered by buildings.

Have you used an application or cloud service that expedites this process? If so, which one and would you recommend it?

From what I'm seeing, most current offerings (12/9/24) are geared towards manually measuring areas and volumes.

I did find this use case discussed as a method for ArcGIS API for Python. I imagine an application does/will do this en masse.
Extracting Building Footprints From Drone Data | ArcGIS API for Python

From my experience, when working with complex data extraction, having solid research and analysis support can make a big difference. I’ve found nursing assignment writer useful when handling detailed reports and structured analysis, so a similar approach—finding specialized tools or expert insights—can help streamline GIS-related workflows too. Have you tried any fully automated services yet?

Thanks in advance!

Extracting building footprints from UAS imagery can be a tricky process, especially in dense urban areas where precision is key.

 

[adm_geomatics]

I'm looking for software that will expedite extracting building footprints from UAS imagery. Consider the case of flying a dense urban area and generating a GIS feature class of polygons representing the areas covered by buildings.

Have you used an application or cloud service that expedites this process? If so, which one and would you recommend it?

From what I'm seeing, most current offerings (12/9/24) are geared towards manually measuring areas and volumes.

I did find this use case discussed as a method for ArcGIS API for Python. I imagine an application does/will do this en masse.
Extracting Building Footprints From Drone Data | ArcGIS API for Python

Thanks in advance!

How accurate do you need it to be? First priority is that you have a low enough GSD to create crisp edges for AI feature extraction to work. Even with training these models still have trouble because of the wide variety of shapes and roofing materials. Picterra does a good job and is a standalone online platform but takes manual training. A lot of other softwares have feature extraction tools, but I have yet to use one that highly accurately automated the process to a point where it and the amount of QC and tweaking required was any faster than manually drafting if you are truly needing simple hard cornered footprints. AI tends to draw too many vertices and miss small features. All of these desktop-based softwares have some sort of feature extraction from raster content.

Picterra
ArcGIS Pro
QGIS
eCognition
Pix4Dsurvey
Global Mapper
Agisoft Metashape
AutoCAD Map 3D / Civil 3D
OpenDroneMap (WebODM)
ENVI

 

[MapMaker53]

I doubt if any automated process would be very accurate considering all of the building shadows in an urban setting due to sun angle. As a person who often draws maps manually from aerials using CADD, I can tell you first-hand it is often difficult to determine building footprints, even by eye.

 

[adm_geomatics]

I doubt if any automated process would be very accurate considering all of the building shadows in an urban setting due to sun angle. As a person who often draws maps manually from aerials using CADD, I can tell you first-hand it is often difficult to determine building footprints, even by eye.

Totally agree. It also begs the question what do you need to consider as "footprint". Some use case and the entire covered area, some the impervious cover and some just the living space. Trees and secondary structures don't help.