About Building footprint, one of the features of Azure maps

Question

Would you tell me us about the features of Building footprint because customers want to use them.

・Can customers provide their own regional map data for capturing building footprints, or do they use maps already available in Azure Maps? 

・Also, are the building outlines pre-mapped in Azure Maps, or do customers generate the outlines themselves using the feature?

・What is the recognition rate and accuracy of building outlines?

・Please provide any guidance on the features and usage of Building footprint.

Answer 1

The base road maps do display building footprints. These are already there when zoomed in. Currently large footprints (e.g. sporting venues) appear at zoom level 14, and most others appear at zoom level 15. Azure maps currently only displays the footprints and they are not generally interactive or expose any additional information such as height. That said, the raw building footprint data is available for free here: https://github.com/microsoft/GlobalMLBuildingFootprints This site includes details on how the data was created. I believe Microsoft (Bing Maps and Azure Maps) also use some data from Open Street Maps, possibly building footprint data (would make sense since the data Microsoft created was made available to Open Street Maps).