Sunlight simulation is often used to analyze whether buildings receive sufficient sunlight in complex design cases. However, it is time-consuming to establish geometrical and physical models, and non-negligible computation time (from a few seconds to minutes) leads to high time cost of iterative design optimization. Therefore, this study builds surrogate models to instantaneously detect problematic buildings (those receiving insufficient sunlight) using images of residential blocks. Different conditional generative adversarial networks (CGANs), including Pix2Pix and conditional attention GAN (CAGAN), are employed to train surrogate models. The attention mechanisms and the multi-scale vision give CAGAN an edge in capturing the global structure of buildings and learning high-level knowledge related to the occlusion relationships between buildings. In addition, this study also proposes a stepwise strategy to construct composite surrogate models. The first sub-model provides more informative images to help the second sub-model learn the features of problematic buildings. This study focuses on evaluating the models based on the detection performance in addition to image structural similarity and pixel similarity, which have been used in most studies. The CAGAN models outperform the Pix2Pix models in the average detection accuracy (ADA) and the 100 % successful detection probability (SDP) on the same dataset. Moreover, the stepwise strategy increases the ADA and SDP to 89.88 % and 71.07 %, respectively. The proposed methods can be extended to other urban environmental performance diagnoses, such as thermal comfort or the wind environment.
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