Positional accuracy assessment of the OpenStreetMap buildings layer through automatic homologous pairs detection: the method and a case study

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is currently the largest openly licensed collection of geospatial data. Being OSM increasingly exploited in a variety of applications, research has placed great attention on the assessment of its quality. This work focuses on assessing the quality of OSM buildings. While most of the studies available in literature are limited to the evaluation of OSM building completeness, this work proposes an original approach to assess the positional accuracy of OSM buildings based on comparison with a reference dataset. The comparison relies on a quasi-automated detection of homologous pairs on the two datasets. Based on the homologous pairs found, warping algorithms like e.g. affine transformations and multi-resolution splines can be applied to the OSM buildings to generate a new version having an optimal local match to the reference layer. A quality assessment of the OSM buildings of Milan Municipality (Northern Italy), having an area of about 180 km2, is then presented. After computing some measures of completeness, the algorithm based on homologous points is run using the building layer of the official vector cartography of Milan Municipality as the reference dataset. Approximately 100000 homologous points are found, which show a systematic translation of about 0.4 m on both the X and Y directions and a mean distance of about 0.8 m between the datasets. Besides its efficiency and high degree of automation, the algorithm generates a warped version of OSM buildings which, having by definition a closest match to the reference buildings, can be eventually integrated in the OSM database.