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Most detailed 3D map of almost all buildings in the world
Fast Company – “This incredible map shows the world’s 2.75 billion buildings Researchers mapped exactly where buildings are in the world and how much space they take up. The result is a mind boggling look at how the world develops.
From the latest skyscraper in a Chinese megalopolis to a six‑foot‑tall yurt in Inner Mongolia, researchers at the Technical University of Munich claim they have created a map of all buildings worldwide: 2.75 billion building models set in high‑resolution 3D with a level of precision never before recorded. Made from years of satellite data analysis by machine‑learning algorithms, the model reflects a sustained effort to capture the built world in three dimensions. The result now provides a crucial basis for climate research and for tracking progress toward global sustainable development goals, according to the scientists behind it.
Professor Xiaoxiang Zhu, who leads the project and is the chair of data science in Earth observation at TUM, saysthe real achievement is that the new map is a three‑dimensional picture of how much space people actually inhabit. “3D building information provides a much more accurate picture of urbanization and poverty than traditional 2D maps,” she explains. With 3D models “we see not only the footprint but also the volume of each building.”
Zhu, X. X., Chen, S., Zhang, F., Shi, Y., and Wang, Y.: Global Building Atlas: an open global and complete dataset of building polygons, heights and LoD1 3D models, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 17, 6647–6668, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-6647-2025, 2025. “We introduce GlobalBuildingAtlas, a publicly available dataset providing global and complete coverage of building polygons, heights and Level of Detail 1 (LoD1) 3D building models.
This is the first open dataset to offer high quality, consistent, and complete building data in 2D and 3D form at the individual building level on a global scale. Towards this dataset, we developed machine learning-based pipelines to derive building polygons and heights (called GBA.Height) from global PlanetScope satellite data, respectively. Also a quality-based fusion strategy was employed to generate higher-quality polygons (called GBA.Polygon) based on existing open building polygons, including our own derived one.
With more than 2.75 billion buildings worldwide, GBA.Polygon surpasses the most comprehensive database to date by more than 1 billion buildings. GBA.Height offers the most detailed and accurate global 3D building height maps to date, achieving a spatial resolution of 3 m × 3 m – 30 times finer than previous global products (90 m), enabling a high-resolution and reliable analysis of building volumes at both local and global scales.
Finally, we generated a global LoD1 building model (called GBA.LoD1) from the resulting GBA.Polygon and GBA.Height. GBA.LoD1 represents the first complete global LoD1 building models, including 2.68 billion building instances with predicted heights, i.e., with a height completeness of more than 97 %, achieving RMSEs ranging from 1.5 to 8.9 m across different continents. With its height accuracy, comprehensive global coverage and rich spatial details, GlobalBuildingAtlas offers novel insights on the status quo of global buildings, which unlocks unprecedented geospatial analysis possibilities, as showcased by a better illustration of where people live and a more comprehensive monitoring of the progress on the 11th Sustainable Development Goal of the United Nations.” The code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/GlobalBuildingAtlas (last access: 1 November 2025). The GBA dataset described in this manuscript can be accessed on mediaTUM under https://doi.org/10.14459/2025mp1782307 (Zhu et al., b)
