BuildingWorld: A Structured 3D Building Dataset for Urban Foundation Models
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Abstract (arXiv)
As digital twins become central to the transformation of modern cities, accurate and structured 3D building models emerge as a key enabler of high-fidelity, updatable urban representations. These models underpin diverse applications including energy modeling, urban planning, autonomous navigation, and real-time reasoning. Despite recent advances in 3D urban modeling, most learning-based models are trained on building datasets with limited architectural diversity, which significantly undermines their generalizability across heterogeneous urban environments. To address this limitation, we present BuildingWorld, a comprehensive and structured 3D building dataset designed to bridge the gap in stylistic diversity. It encompasses buildings from geographically and architecturally diverse regions -- including North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania -- offering a globally representative dataset for urban-scale foundation modeling and analysis. Specifically, BuildingWorld provides about five million LOD2 building models collected from diverse sources, accompanied by real and simulated airborne LiDAR point clouds. This enables comprehensive research on 3D building reconstruction, detection and segmentation. Cyber City, a virtual city model, is introduced to enable the generation of unlimited training data with customized and structurally diverse point cloud distributions. Furthermore, we provide standardized evaluation metrics tailored for building reconstruction, aiming to facilitate the training, evaluation, and comparison of large-scale vision models and foundation models in structured 3D urban environments.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 15 of its 48 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Nov 2025.
Builds on
15 of 48 references.
References · 15
- 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 13,958
- 2023Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Modelscited by 12,865
- 2023DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervisioncited by 7,764
- 2023PointLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Understand Point Cloudscited by 326
- 2022STPLS3D: A Large-Scale Synthetic and Real Aerial Photogrammetry 3D Point Cloud Datasetcited by 52
- 2022SensatUrban: Learning Semantics from Urban-Scale Photogrammetric Point Cloudscited by 49
- 2020Next-Best View Policy for 3D Reconstructioncited by 35
- 2021BuildingNet: Learning to Label 3D Buildingscited by 33
- 2023Building3D: An Urban-Scale Dataset and Benchmarks for Learning Roof Structures from Point Cloudscited by 24
- 2021SUM: A Benchmark Dataset of Semantic Urban Meshescited by 23
- 2022Learning to Construct 3D Building Wireframes from 3D Line Cloudscited by 9
- 2025ArcPro: Architectural Programs for Structured 3D Abstraction of Sparse Pointscited by 6
3 more
- 2020Curved Buildings Reconstruction from Airborne LiDAR Data by Matching and Deforming Geometric Primitivescited by 2
- 2021UrbanVR: An immersive analytics system for context-aware urban designcited by 1
- 2025Pre-training with 3D Synthetic Data: Learning 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation from 3D Synthetic Scenescited by 1
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
1 paper.