Advancing Urban Renewal: An Automated Approach to Generating Historical Arcade Facades with Stable Diffusion Models

Abstract

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.