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In a world that’s constantly evolving—with new buildings rising, roads closed for construction, and neighborhoods expanding rapidly—keeping digital maps accurate is harder than ever. Whether you’re in logistics, emergency response, city planning or the autonomous vehicle industry, you need maps that reflect the latest changes to the built environment.

Historically, updating maps meant relying on manual surveys or waiting on data from local authorities, methods that are often slow and outdated. Even with signals from modern sources like in-app driver alerts and on-board sensors, it’s hard to tell which changes are temporary and which demand a full map update.

Enter the Maxar® Building and Road Change Product

The new Maxar Building and Road Change product is a cutting-edge vector solution powered by proprietary computer vision (CV) models. It detects early indicators of new construction and infrastructure changes, helping you monitor critical developments as they happen on a global scale.

The Maxar Building and Road Change product analyzes Sentinel-2 electro-optical source imagery, which has 5-day revisit or better across the global landmass. Our purpose-built AI algorithm analyzes the fresh Sentinel imagery against older imagery to determine significant changes to buildings and roads. We then output those changes as vector products, providing you with a consistent view of areas with large population growth and vital infrastructure.

Automated change detection for more efficient mapmaking

Rather than updating entire maps or large areas at once, which requires more time and resources, you can now prioritize updates exactly where the change has occurred. Our Building and Road Change vectors can help you identify exactly where to task new 30 cm-class imagery from the Maxar constellation for precise digitization of change. Easily integrate this data into your existing workflows to reduce the update area and accelerate your maintenance cycle. Access is flexible, with vectors available for offline use or streamed via Maxar Geospatial Platform (MGP) Web Feature Service.

Looking ahead

Building and Road Change is just the beginning of Maxar’s vision for intelligent mapping. We’re working toward a future where maps update themselves in near real-time. Until then, Maxar remains the only provider that can detect meaningful global changes and collect new imagery at the scale, detail and consistency your mapping applications demand.