Scalability in Building Component Data Annotation: Enhancing Facade
  Material Classification with Synthetic Data
Josie Harrison Alexander Hollberg Yinan Yu
Computer vision models trained on Google Street View images can create
material cadastres. However, current approaches need manually annotated
datasets that are difficult to obtain and often have class imbalance. To
address these challenges, this paper fine-tuned a Swin Transformer model on a
synthetic dataset generated with DALL-E and compared the performance to a
similar manually annotated dataset. Although manual annotation remains the gold
standard, the synthetic dataset performance demonstrates a reasonable
alternative. The findings will ease annotation needed to develop material
cadastres, offering architects insights into opportunities for material reuse,
thus contributing to the reduction of demolition waste.