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TU Munich Releases Open 3D Global Building Atlas Covering 2.75 Billion Structures

The GitHub release delivers 3‑meter LoD1 models ready for urban, energy, disaster analyses.

Overview

  • The GlobalBuildingAtlas maps building footprints, heights and volumes worldwide using roughly 800,000 PlanetScope images, AI extraction and LIDAR-trained height inference.
  • The dataset provides 97% LoD1 models at 3‑meter resolution and reports global totals of about 506,640 billion m² built area and 2.85 trillion m³ building volume.
  • Coverage expands prior databases by roughly one billion structures and achieves about 30× finer spatial detail than earlier global building maps.
  • Regional counts show about 1.22 billion buildings in Asia, roughly 560 million in the Americas, about 540 million in Africa and a little over 400 million in Europe.
  • All data and code are freely available on GitHub and a TU Munich platform, with immediate interest from users such as DLR for planning, energy modeling and disaster preparedness; coverage reflects 2019 imagery availability and LoD1 simplifications.