3ddemfootprintsingapore
I am looking for providers of 3D maps/models of Singapore.
This might be either from photogrammetry/laser techniques or based on a DEM + building footprints/landuse with a height attribute.
Is any such data available either in public repositories or from specialized companies?
Lots of Spatial Data for Singapore
and Census Data
http://www.onemap.sg/index.html?PopulationQuery
Web Mapping available here:
If I wanted some ready-to-go building footprints, I'd start calling county Assessor offices and city planning departments. I think they will be your best bet for ready-made building footprint polygons. However because these are expensive data, I believe it's rare to find them free for the taking. It's likely even rarer to find it associated with sparsely-populated areas. :/
On the other hand, if you can get LIDAR data for your area of interest, you could use Whitebox GAT to perform building footprint extraction. I just followed this tutorial, which comes with some sample data. I uploaded a couple screenshots for you.
The first image is the "first return" values from the LIDAR data, I identified some areas to consider marked with black squares:
This next image is the building extraction (buildings in red). The area at the top seems unlike the obvious buildings. I suspect it's a pond. Also, that curvilinear stretch is unexpected, maybe I did something wrong configuring the method arguments..
Unfortunately, the sample data didn't include an aerial to compare to the LIDAR data, so it's difficult to be very confident with the extractions. I grabbed some "actual" LIDAR data (Jasper County, MO) from another source, and that dataset wasn't as plug-and-play, leading me to believe some post-processing/cleaning is necessary in order to get the same caliber of feature extraction I enjoyed with the sample data.
Anyway, assuming you perfected the processing/extraction methodology, you could then take footprint the rasters extracted from Whitebox and run them through gdal_polygonize to create a building footprint polygon layer.
On another note, and regarding this statement..
..I have no idea how I would go from a street address to a vector graphic of the buildings..
Assuming the vector graphics you mention are spatially aware (that is ArcGIS or QGIS load it in the correct position relative to other datasets), you should be able to geocode your street addresses as a stand-alone point layer. Then, once you have geocoded street points, you could implement that layer "invisibly" as a foundation for footprint queries.
Best Answer
Well this is almost certainly against Google's Terms of Service, so I'm definitely not recommending it, but I found an interesting method of extracting Google Earth building models to OBJ files here: Google Earth to OBJ Using GLIntercept
If you can wait, the Singapore Land Authority is reportedly in the process of developing a 3D togographic dataset. I found a specifications document here. They also have 2D data available here.