Who Is the Designer? ARC-100 Database and Benchmark on Architecture Classification

Abstract

Architecture is about evolution, there exist many types of architectural styles that depend on the geography, traditions, and culture of the particular regions. An architectural designer may have a similar preference in creating the new architectural building, which can be easily recognized from the physical attributes and characteristics. This paper performs an architect classification based on the outward appearance of the building. An architecture database with 100 images (ARC-100) that have balanced class distribution is constructed. Among the architectural buildings, the best performance is 71% for 5-class classification. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated breakthrough performance on various classification tasks in recent studies, and even outperform human experts in specific tasks. Thus, for the baseline evaluation, multiple pretrained CNN models are employed with slight modifications. Prior to the feature extraction and classification processes, the removal of background noise is performed using two approaches: manually and automatically. The former approach requires high human intervention, while the latter utilizes the cutting-edge object segmentation technology, namely mask regional convolutional neural network (R-CNN). The illustration of the experiment training progress and the confusion matrix are reported, to allow further interpretation and analysis for the model trained. Notably, this is the first work that performs automatic classification based on architectural styles. This framework can be used to improve the cultural understanding and practices in providing education for holistic development and enhance the learning experience and progressions from an aesthetic perspective.