Microsoft has released a dataset of more than 12 million building footprints—outlines of the area a structure occupies—for buildings across all Canadian provinces and territories. Microsoft used AI to identify buildings in satellite and aerial imagery and to outline them. Microsoft worked with Statistics Canada, the Canadian government’s statistical agency, to create the dataset, which can improve Canada’s census by helping the nation better understand where people live, particularly in areas that do not appear on maps or connect to known road networks.
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