Building Simplification refinement and back to a single option

The #Mapflow #Buildings simplification should remain a single option. We reverted the UX update we introduced in December 2025.

Back then, we tried splitting into two options for the “🏠 Buildings”:

• “regularisation” (“BUILDINGREGULARISER” — optimized for right-angled structures, producing cleaner and more orthogonal geometries)
• “simplification” (“DYNAMIC_GRID” — preserved original shapes more closely, better for curved or irregular buildings)

Btw, one can find the “simplification confidence score” in the building feature attributes — usually, it’s higher when it’s the “dynamic_grid”, because of the better shape approximation to the original pixel mask.

Feature properties (simplification_confidence_score)

Since then, we have learned that actually most of the users who used “🏠 Buildings” chose both “regularisation” and “simplification” (4,960), and most of the rest of the users used the “regularisation” option (1,473) only, while just a small fraction chose the “simplification” only (165).

Based on the recennt history — the distribution of the options chosen for the 🏠 Buildings model

👉 In other words, the vast majority of users either combined both approaches or prioritized the mapping look.

So, based on the feedback from our commercial and free users, we decided to refine ‘‘simplification’’ and make it a (great 🏆) single, simple option again — yet adopted for different building geometries (rectilinear + curved) in the different construction patterns.

The simplification is enabled by default. And using only one option makes it cheaper for users.

See the examples across different urban patterns:

Urban area, mixed, regular shapes. (Some shapes are intersected and replaced with OpenStreetMap polygons — additional option. Countours are shifted to the footprints based on building height estimates)

High-dense urban area (biased to simple rectangular shapes due to the lower simplification confidence score)

University campus area, complex shapes (the mix of methods worked out)

Urban area mixed, complex shapes (biased to buildingregulariser due the complex shapes with right angles)

BTW, as you process Buildings or Vegetation, take a moment to rate the results ⭐ — it helps us refine the models and improve outcomes for the entire mapping community. 🙏

Reference links:

• Mapflow AI
• Previous attempt and a Simplification app that we developed to help with the settings