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Microsoft Releases 125 Million Building Footprints In the US To the OpenStreetMap Community (mspoweruser.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the come-and-get-it dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSPoweruser: Today, Microsoft announced that it is releasing 124 Million building footprints in the United States to the OpenStreetMap community. Bing Maps team used Microsoft's CNTK Unified Toolkit to apply its Deep Neural Networks and the ResNet34 with RefineNet up-sampling layers to detect building footprints from the Bing imagery. OpenStreetMap currently has 30,567,953 building footprints in the U.S., thanks to editor contributions and various city or county wide imports. Using DNNs and Bing Imagery, Microsoft has extracted 124,885,597 footprints in the United States and making it available for download free of charge.

3 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft has redeemed itself. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I didn't like the Microsoft of the 1990s and the early 2000s, but I like the Microsoft of today. Between open sourcing so much of .NET, and giving us the excellent VS Code, and giving us TypeScript, and giving us excellent contributions like this mapping stuff, I think it has redeemed itself. I'd much rather use Microsoft software these days than software from Google or Apple or especially Red Hat. That's how much things have changed: Microsoft has repeatedly improved my Linux experience with stuff like open source .NET and VS Code, while Red Hat has ruined it thanks to junk like systemd, PulseAudio, GNOME 3 and Wayland. Some anti-Microsoft fools will probably make false accusations about me being 'a paid shill for MS', but the reality is that I'm just an uncompensated and satisfied user of their software. As strange as it is to say it, Microsoft is the company that has improved my Linux experience the most over the past 4 to 5 years.

    1. Re:Microsoft has redeemed itself. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I had to use Windows 10 this week. I'd say MS is a long way from redeemed.

      You are conflating incompetence with evil. MS is still incompetent, and their software is still terrible, but their evilness has greatly diminished.

      Of course, this is not by choice, but because they no longer have the market power to impose their will. For instance, they have realized they have lost the mapping battle. So they are throwing their data open, at little cost to themselves, as a spoiler for Google and Apple, but to the benefit of the public.

  2. Whatever improves OSM is good news by williamyf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No matter where it comes from.

    Thanks to Microsoft for this contribution. Hope to see some more out of the USoA (where I am from).

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    PS: Now, if you guys could also Fix Win10, would be even better.

    I use MacOS, but still have to go back to Win10 from time to time, and get an awful experience each and every time.

    --
    *** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!