Vectorized building rooftop prints of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau and its neighboring regions

Large-scale high-precision building distribution data is important fundation for regional urban planning and resource allocation and disaster risk research. The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau is the third pole of the world. Although understanding local human-environment interactions in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau is critically important, this has been hindered by a lack of high-resolution building footprint data due to the vastness and remoteness of the area. In this study, we generated the first vectorized building rooftop prints of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau and its surrounding areas by using high-resolution Google imagery and the building contour extraction algorithm of the AI Earth platform. Our results include 13.09 million buildings covering 6092.7 km², validated with a total of 250 × 1 km² test samples. The data had an overall accuracy of 87%, a recall of 91.9%, and an F1 score of 64.8%, thus providing an advanced description of the building distribution of the study area as compared to CBRA. Our work has immense potential in facilitating exposure assessment for studies on disaster risk in this area.