EarthDefine Building Footprints 3D
193M+ properties mapped, with heights and elevations. Available off-the-shelf.
EarthDefine Building Footprints 3D gives you GIS-ready building polygons for the entire United States: 193 million buildings mapped from high-resolution imagery and LiDAR, with rooftop outlines over 98% accurate. Every building is tied to a street address, and 167 million carry heights, estimated stories, and volume. Available off-the-shelf and refreshed as new imagery and LiDAR become available.
Accurate, current, and ready to drop into your workflows.
Heights, estimated stories, and volume for RF simulation, line-of-sight analysis, and full 3D city models.
Building Footprints 3D provides GIS-ready building data to support a host of mapping and spatial-analysis functions.
We refresh nationwide building footprints on a rolling two-year cycle, updating about half the states each year. As our AI and post-processing advance, we make quarterly improvements. Every dataset reflects the latest publicly available imagery and LiDAR.
Explore Dallas, TX in 3D: building footprints with heights, estimated stories, and volume, draped over 2020 aerial imagery.
Download the datasheet, or grab free samples for any of 49 US cities.
The majority of buildings are classified from USDA NAIP (National Agriculture Imagery Program) imagery, supplemented by publicly available LiDAR data where available.
The NAIP imagery is a mix of 30-60cm spatial resolution, georectified by the USDA to +/- 6m at a 95% confidence level (CE95).
Buildings are classified from imagery using state-of-the-art deep-learning algorithms. Once classified, they are converted to vector format, regularized (squared up), split by parcel boundaries, addressed, and merged statewide.
Buildings are over 98% accurate on a pixel-by-pixel basis, validated against dozens of urban areas across the country. By Intersection over Union (IoU), the accuracy is over 94%.
Because NAIP imagery is flown state-by-state, buildings are updated whenever new imagery becomes available. Most states fund NAIP every other year, so a nationwide refresh occurs roughly every two years. We also update buildings when we significantly improve our AI or post-classification processing; updates ship quarterly, with the most significant changes arriving alongside new imagery or LiDAR.
Beyond lags in available NAIP imagery, some areas retain older data where NAIP is not available or has not been updated. Military bases and other sensitive areas are examples where recent NAIP is not authorised for public use. Occasionally NAIP imagery does not meet EarthDefine's quality standards, in which case older imagery may be used to derive higher-quality footprints.
Not yet. We do not currently track when new buildings appear or how they change over time. The date associated with a building refers to the year of the imagery it was mapped from, not when the building appeared or changed.
Talk to our team about a nationwide or regional Building Footprints 3D license, or download a free sample to evaluate the data yourself.
