Formal and Informal Structures of Bulawayo

To automate the process of building structure analysis, a dataset of images of various building structures in the Bulawayo metropolitan area in Zimbabwe, Africa, was created. The dataset comprises images of formal and informal structures located within the Bulawayo metropolitan area in Zimbabwe, Africa. Formal and informal structures are structures accounted for and unaccounted for by the city council, respectively. These images were captured using digital cameras, smartphones, and drones between August 2021 and September 2022. The intended use of these images is twofold. Firstly, they can serve general purposes, aiding in the understanding of the features and architecture of African residential buildings from engineering, architectural, or artistic perspectives. Furthermore, these images can support the development of machine learning models specifically designed for the African context. To mirror the intended use, there are two main folders in the dataset, namely, General and Machine Learning. The General folder has 850 images placed in three subfolders: Formal Structures, Informal Structures and Mixed Structures. As the names suggest, the images in these three subfolders consist of formal structures, informal structures, and a combination of both types of structures, respectively. The Machine Learning folder has two sub-folders: images and labels. The images folder has 984 images placed into three sub-folders of images namely train, validate and test. The labels folder contains text files that include labels for each image. The labels follow the You Only Look Once (YOLO) format.