Creating Building Footprints from Aerial Photos

[JonathanCrist]

Can someone tell me the best way to create building footprints from aerial images? I'm trying to create them in bulk instead of digitizing each building manually. Is this possible?

[JeffreySwain]

Consider one of the object-oriented classification programs like Feature Analyst or Envi's Feature Extraction Module.  You can try to use a Supervised Classification or Unsupervised, but the processing might be more difficult.

[RaymondChetti]

Can someone tell me the best way to create building footprints from aerial images? I'm trying to create them in bulk instead of digitizing each building manually. Is this possible?

I am actually also looking to do this as well...the reply from jbswain implies we must buy software to in order to create building footprints from aerial images...there aren't any functions within ArcGIS that create footprints in bulk?

[MichaelVolz]

Even with the automated tools, you would probably still have a huge cleanup job where the automated process drew many of the polygons incorrectly.

You might try to consider hiring a company that is expert at performing this work, so you have a relatively clean dataset when the job is complete (Creative financing and hard-sell of multiple uses of this data to money managers).  My organization was able to somehow come up with the money to do this.

We can now spend our money on making the flat dataset more useful by relating it to parcel and assessment data instead of spending our time digitizing polygons.

[RaymondChetti]

Even with the automated tools, you would probably still have a huge cleanup job where the automated process drew many of the polygons incorrectly.

You might try to consider hiring a company that is expert at performing this work, so you have a relatively clean dataset when the job is complete (Creative financing and hard-sell of multiple uses of this data to money managers).  My organization was able to somehow come up with the money to do this.

We can now spend our money on making the flat dataset more useful by relating it to parcel and assessment data instead of spending our time digitizing polygons.

Thanks for your reply, I'll take a look into that if I may need to. The main reason why I was curious about footprints is because I want to create 3D models in CityEngine...I heard from GIS Exchange that you can copy/export data from OpenStreetMap (.osm files) and just import it into CityEngine and it will give you your footprints and everything there?

http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/56943/openstreetmap-data-into-esri-cityengine/56955#56955

[saurabhkulkarni]

Hi!
   Do you have a general estimate of how much you paid for this ? $ / Area?

Thank you.
S.

Even with the automated tools, you would probably still have a huge cleanup job where the automated process drew many of the polygons incorrectly.

You might try to consider hiring a company that is expert at performing this work, so you have a relatively clean dataset when the job is complete (Creative financing and hard-sell of multiple uses of this data to money managers).  My organization was able to somehow come up with the money to do this.

We can now spend our money on making the flat dataset more useful by relating it to parcel and assessment data instead of spending our time digitizing polygons.

[MichaelVolz]

For the county I work in, we paid $300,000 to get all impervious surfaces which included a building footprint layer.  It should be noted that due to the accuracy of the parcel layer, these sub-parcel vectors were not always in the parcel boundaries.

If we had just wanted building footprints, it would have cost $200,000.  By getting all impervious with the same contract, we paid an additional $100,000 for more than double the features of just building footprints.