Image‐based prediction of residential building attributes with deep learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study estimates building attributes-floor area and age-using image-based machine learning. Building age and floor area are key inputs to the studies of urban metabolism, material stocks and flows, and embodied greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the built environment. However, these data are challenging to generate and maintain using traditional survey methods, their availability is uneven and often, even when available, very uncertain. Improving our understanding and future management of built environment resource flows and associated environmental impacts requires more complete access to building age and floor area data. The study formulates area prediction as a regression problem and age prediction as a classification problem over six historical periods, achieving a mean absolute percentage error of 19.42% for area prediction and an accuracy of 70.27% for age prediction in Toronto. These results are obtained using an EfficientNetV2 module for feature extraction from Google Street View images, followed by fully connected layers for estimating the two building attributes. The performance of the Toronto-trained model in five other Canadian cities is also reported, highlighting the model's varying effectiveness in different urban contexts and the benefit of local training. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of using machine learning for building attribute estimation from street-view images, offering a basis for future automated large-scale material flow and stock analysis. Supplementary Information: The online version of this article (doi:10.1111/jiec.13591) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".