[Buildings] ~15,000 Microsoft ML footprints on farm dams in Western Australia
Nadie ha tomado este issue todavía.
Evaluación
- Dificultad
- 4/5
- Tiempo estimado
- 3-5 días
- Aptitud para principiantes
- 48/100
Línea de trabajo
Start by reading the existing water exclusion filter referenced in the issue and the prior work in #199; the issue proposes adding a farm dam source to that filter, with a 50% overlap threshold. Review #458 and #478 for the data source work and confirm how the DPIRD polygons are supplied. Done means the false building footprints on mapped farm dams are excluded across the dataset without removing real buildings.
Escrito por el modelo de indexación a partir del texto del issue.
Descripción
Release
2026-09-23.1
Theme
buildings
Feature type
building
GERS ID
9cb1e315-5385-4b24-812f-84516b589efe, 71a11bb5-466c-438e-afc8-f73a4cfee4d9, 7fcac848-2aa7-43e8-9ae2-9ccb9f99432b, 93aca956-4cb4-4045-9b54-4bd3ee2949fc (examples; all 15,109 are in the attachment)
Location
Western Australia's agricultural zone. Most of the hits fall in bbox 115.1, -34.8, 122.1, -29.5 (lon/lat), with a scattering across the rest of the state. Example: https://explore.overturemaps.org/#18/-33.46269/117.93659
What kind of problem is it?
Feature doesn't exist in the real world
What's wrong
About 15,000 Microsoft ML building footprints in Western Australia are farm dams that the model mistook for buildings. They trace dam water and dam banks.
- 15,109 Microsoft ML footprints lie at least 50% inside a mapped farm dam, 2.3% of the 646,522 Microsoft footprints in the areas checked. Only 173 OpenStreetMap buildings do (0.09%); a sample of those were real structures under a dam polygon that is wrong or out of date.
- In a manual imagery review of 100 random Microsoft hits, 99 are not buildings (99%, 95% CI 94.6–99.8%).
- They sit on 14,129 distinct dams, 8.1% of all mapped farm dams in the state.
#199 established that ML buildings crossing water are already excluded during conflation. These most likely get through because farm dams are almost entirely missing from the water data: only 289 of the 15,282 hits (1.9%) have their centre inside any polygon in base/water.
Footprints (red) inside DPIRD farm dam polygons (cyan), over Esri World Imagery:
| Example | GERS ID | Lat, lon | Area | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
9cb1e315-5385-4b24-812f-84516b589efe |
−33.46269, 117.93659 | 1,021 m² | Shallow dam water | |
71a11bb5-466c-438e-afc8-f73a4cfee4d9 |
−33.73576, 118.71789 | 601 m² | Dam water surface | |
7fcac848-2aa7-43e8-9ae2-9ccb9f99432b |
−33.36167, 120.10574 | 225 m² | Half on dam water, half on the bank | |
93aca956-4cb4-4045-9b54-4bd3ee2949fc |
−35.08762, 117.92193 | 166 m² | Dark dam water |
The footprints' own attributes don't separate them. Their sources entry has confidence: null. Missing height is the strongest signal, but 94% of footprints with no height are not on dams, so dropping them would remove about 15 other buildings for every false one. Area doesn't separate them either: median 192 m² against 198 m².
What you expected
These footprints should be excluded, like ML buildings that cross mapped water. The fix that scales is to add a farm-dam source to the existing water exclusion filter, so it works across the dataset rather than per feature (#458, #478). Two open sources cover this:
-
Farm dams of Western Australia (DPIRD). 175,143 dam polygons for WA, CC BY 4.0. This is the layer that found these errors. Its metadata estimates about 1,800 features in the South West are not dams, so a ≥50% overlap threshold is sensible. I'm proposing it as a data source separately.
-
DEA Waterbodies (Geoscience Australia). National, but built from 30 m Landsat pixels, so it misses most farm dams: only 215 of the 15,109 dam hits (1.4%) fall inside a DEA polygon. Run on its own across WA it flags a largely different set of 2,245 buildings, and a 100-hit review found 76 not buildings and 24 real. Waterbody size decides it:
DEA waterbody size Not a building Real Over 100 ha 51 2 10–100 ha 9 5 1–10 ha 13 16 Under 1 ha 3 1 The large ones are mostly inland salt lakes, with footprints on bare lake beds. The small ones include polygons over Perth suburbs and industrial sites that cover real houses. If DEA is used, restrict it to waterbodies over about 100 ha.
Evidence
All 175,143 DPIRD farm dam polygons were intersected with every building in the 40,745 zoom-14 tiles of buildings.pmtiles (2026-09-23.1) they touch, 829,146 buildings in total. A building counts as a hit when at least half its footprint lies inside a dam, estimated from a 6 × 6 grid of points inside the footprint. 100 random hits were then labelled one at a time over Esri World Imagery: 99 not a building, 1 real.
wa_building_dam_hits.zip holds all 15,282 hits as GeoJSON (with footprints) and CSV. Both have the same columns: overture_id, geometry_source, height_m, area_m2, frac_in_dam (share of the footprint inside a dam), dpird_dam_objectid, lat, lon. overture_id is the GERS ID.
I'm the custodian of the DPIRD farm dams dataset and happy to help with access or questions about it.
Source attribution
[{"property":"","dataset":"Microsoft ML Buildings","license":"ODbL-1.0","record_id":null,"update_time":null,"confidence":null,"between":null,"provider":"microsoft","resource":"ml_buildings","version":"2026-08-11"}]
How you accessed the data
buildings.pmtiles and base.pmtiles for 2026-09-23.1 from the overturemaps-extras-us-west-2 bucket, read tile by tile at zoom 14 (buildings) and 13 (water) with the pmtiles JS library; overlap tested against the DPIRD and DEA polygons in Node. Example GERS IDs confirmed in the 2026-09-23.1 GeoParquet with DuckDB.
Before submitting
- I searched existing issues and didn't find this one.
- I confirmed the problem is in the latest release, or I noted the release above.
- Lenguaje dominante
- Python
- Estrellas
- 1.2k
- Forks
- 48
- Merge medio
- 56 min
- PR fusionados (30 d)
- 2
Preparar el entorno
- Sin Dockerfile ni archivo de Docker Compose
- Sin plantilla de pull request
- Leer la guía de contribución
Primeros pasos
- Lee el issue completo y luego la guía de contribución del proyecto.
- Comenta en el issue que vas a ocuparte — evita que dos personas hagan lo mismo.
- Haz un fork del repositorio y trabaja en una rama.
- Abre un pull request que haga referencia al número del issue.
Más de OvertureMaps/data
-
external
Dificultad 2/5 1-3 horas Aptitud para principiantes 68/100
OvertureMaps/data#584 ·
-
external
Dificultad 2/5 1-3 horas Aptitud para principiantes 70/100
OvertureMaps/data#509 ·
-
Places (FI): ~90 duplicate, misplaced, non-pharmacy or closed features in the pharmacy categoryAbiertoexternal
Dificultad 4/5 3-5 días Aptitud para principiantes 49/100
OvertureMaps/data#585 ·
-
[Places] Closed Feather River hospital identity mixed with active Skyway clinic (Paradise, CA)Abiertoexternal
Dificultad 4/5 3-5 días Aptitud para principiantes 22/100
OvertureMaps/data#583 ·
-
data-sources external
Dificultad 5/5 Más de una semana Aptitud para principiantes 35/100
OvertureMaps/data#581 ·
Todos los issues de OvertureMaps/data
Issues similares
-
bug
Dificultad 2/5 1-3 horas Aptitud para principiantes 72/100
ansys/pyansys-common-mcp#213 ·
Los mantenedores suelen responder en 3 días
-
bug
Dificultad 2/5 1-3 horas Aptitud para principiantes 67/100
freedomofpress/dangerzone#1594 ·
Los mantenedores suelen responder en 3 días
-
priority:P1 status:in-review type:bug
Dificultad 2/5 1-3 horas Aptitud para principiantes 75/100
randomparity/kdive#3317 · 1 comentario ·
Los mantenedores suelen responder en 1 día
-
area:ci
Dificultad 1/5 Menos de una hora Aptitud para principiantes 90/100
Los mantenedores suelen responder en 1 día
-
Dificultad 2/5 1-3 horas Aptitud para principiantes 66/100
mesonbuild/meson#16281 ·
Los mantenedores suelen responder en 1 día