Advancing Urban Renewal: An Automated Approach to Generating Historical
  Arcade Facades with Stable Diffusion Models
Zheyuan Kuang Jiaxin Zhang Yiying Huang Yunqin Li
Urban renewal and transformation processes necessitate the preservation of
the historical urban fabric, particularly in districts known for their
architectural and historical significance. These regions, with their diverse
architectural styles, have traditionally required extensive preliminary
research, often leading to subjective results. However, the advent of machine
learning models has opened up new avenues for generating building facade
images. Despite this, creating high-quality images for historical district
renovations remains challenging, due to the complexity and diversity inherent
in such districts. In response to these challenges, our study introduces a new
methodology for automatically generating images of historical arcade facades,
utilizing Stable Diffusion models conditioned on textual descriptions. By
classifying and tagging a variety of arcade styles, we have constructed several
realistic arcade facade image datasets. We trained multiple low-rank adaptation
(LoRA) models to control the stylistic aspects of the generated images,
supplemented by ControlNet models for improved precision and authenticity. Our
approach has demonstrated high levels of precision, authenticity, and diversity
in the generated images, showing promising potential for real-world urban
renewal projects. This new methodology offers a more efficient and accurate
alternative to conventional design processes in urban renewal, bypassing issues
of unconvincing image details, lack of precision, and limited stylistic
variety. Future research could focus on integrating this two-dimensional image
generation with three-dimensional modeling techniques, providing a more
comprehensive solution for renovating architectural facades in historical
districts.