A deep learning-based study on visual quality assessment of commercial renovation of Chinese traditional building facades

Abstract

In the context of urban renewal, the renovation of Chinese traditional building facades is very important for realizing the renewal of architectural functions and enhancing the urban style. It is of great theoretical and practical significance to assess the visual quality of commercial renovation of Chinese traditional building facades and explore its relationship with the visual features of facades scientifically. Traditional methods based on manual questionnaire surveys and data analysis suffer certain limitations in terms of cost, time, and measurement scale; meanwhile, the research results obtained are prone to be easily influenced by the respondent's subjective preference. In this study, the CRTBFD (Commercial Renovation of Traditional Building Facades Dataset) was firstly constructed, which contained 560 images of commercial renovation of traditional building facades. On account of this dataset, a classification model based on deep learning, Swin-HV (Swin transformer for Historical and cultural atmosphere and Visual preference), was developed. The model can assess and predict the visual quality of commercial renovation of traditional building facades from two aspects: historical and cultural atmosphere and visual preference. In addition, an object detection model called TBFE-YOLO (YOLO for Traditional Building Facade Elements) was proposed, capable of identifying nine traditional building facade elements from reconstructed images. Finally, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient was used to analyze the correlation between visual quality assessment and these nine facade elements, while Grad-CAM++ was employed to further visualize the model's decision-making process. The results show that the Swin-HV model achieves high precision in predicting historical and cultural atmosphere and visual preference assessment. Moreover, it is found that the visual quality assessment of commercial renovation of traditional building facades is closely related to the elements of traditional building facades. The method proposed in this study serves as a reference for urban planning, building conservation, and reuse, while also deepening the understanding of commercial renovation of traditional building facades.