Architectural Style Classification of Building Facade Towers

Abstract

Building facade classification by architectural styles allows categorization of large databases of building images into semantic categories belonging to certain historic periods, regions and cultural influences. Image databases sorted by architectural styles permit effective and fast image search for the purposes of content-based image retrieval, 3D reconstruction, 3D city-modeling, virtual tourism and indexing of cultural heritage buildings. Building facade classification is viewed as a task of classifying separate architectural structural elements, like windows, domes, towers, columns, etc, as every architectural style applies certain rules and characteristic forms for the design and construction of the structural parts mentioned. In the context of building facade architectural style classification the current paper objective is to classify the architectural style of facade windows. Typical windows belonging to Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance/Baroque European main architectural periods are classified. The approach is based on clustering and learning of local features, applying intelligence that architects use to classify windows of the mentioned architectural styles in the training stage.