Foundational map features such as roads, building footprints, and points of interest are primarily created through manual techniques. Advancing automated feature extraction techniques will serve important downstream uses of geospatial data such as humanitarian assistance and disaster response. To that end, CosmiQ Works worked with DigitalGlobe to launch SpaceNet, a collaboration initiative aimed at accelerating open source geospatial analytics applied research. The first SpaceNet Challenge was structured around automated building footprint identification in a single city, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The SpaceNet team developed and open sourced a data consisting of a DigitalGlobe Worldview mosaic along with nearly 400,000 hand-annotated building footprint polygons. The public data science challenge was hosted on TopCoder and ran from November 2016 to January 2017. The code from the top 5 challenge participants were open sourced under the Apache 2 License on SpaceNet Github repository.

CosmiQ Works conducted this project in coordination with the other SpaceNet Partners: DigitalGlobe, Amazon Web Services, and NVIDIA.

Learn more at www.spacenet.ai.