Mapping All of Australia

In 2017, Geoscape Australia (the Australian authority on property information formerly known as PSMA) had a bold plan: to map the entire continent of Australia with a level of detail that had never been contemplated before. There was a strong need from a number of organizations across multiple industries within Australia that required up-to-date information regarding the built environment across the continent. However, no reliable source of information on these features existed at-scale.

For this project, Geoscape Australia required two major components to complete a project of this magnitude: satellite imagery of the entire continent with enough granularity to map buildings, and the ability to extract each building footprints with the accuracy of a trained GIS professional across the country. Geoscape worked with Maxar (formerly DigitalGlobe) to source the imagery, and leveraged Ecopia’s Global Feature Extraction to extract the building footprints.

Working closely with our partners at Maxar, Ecopia’s AI-based systems rapidly produced a high-definition vector map of Australia, extracting 16,493,191 buildings across the 7.692 million square kilometer continent. The result formed the foundational building footprints layer of Geoscape's product. This data provides key information for critical national activities such as: transportation, risk mitigation, emergency response, and infrastructure rollout.

In 2019, the Australian building footprint extraction was refreshed using the most current Maxar satellite imagery, ensuring Geoscape and its customers have the most up-to-date information at-scale. Being able to monitor and analyze changes to the built environment year-over-year also allows various customers to track change. Ecopia has the capability and partnerships to complete these types of extractions around the globe.

Interested in learning more about our Global Feature Extraction services? Click here for a demo.