Information extracted from aerial photographs is widely used in the fields of urban planning and design. An effective method for detecting buildings in aerial photographs is to use deep learning to understand the current state of a target region. However, the building mask images used to train the deep learning model must be manually generated in many cases. To overcome this challenge, a method has been proposed for automatically generating mask images by using textured three-dimensional (3D) virtual models with aerial photographs. Some aerial photographs include clouds, which degrade image quality. These clouds can be removed by using a generative adversarial network (GAN), which leads to improvements in training quality. Therefore, the objective of this research was to propose a method for automatically generating building mask images by using 3D virtual models with textured aerial photographs. In this study, using GAN to remove clouds in aerial photographs improved training quality. A model trained on datasets generated by the proposed method was able to detect buildings in aerial photographs with IoU = 0.651.

Architecture, engineering, and construction projects need to be promoted in harmony with the natural environment and with the aim of preserving people’s living environment. At the planning and design stage, decision-makers and stakeholders share and assess landscape images during and after construction in order to avoid as much uncertainty as possible when performing environmental impact assessment. Given the lack of a standard visualization method for future landscapes that do not yet exist, mixed reality (MR), which overlays virtual content onto a real scene, has attracted attention in the field of landscape design. One challenge in MR is occlusion, which occurs when virtual objects obscure physical objects that should be rendered in the foreground. In MR-based landscape visualization, the distance between the MR camera and real objects located in front of the virtual objects might vary and might be large, causing difficulty for existing occlusion handling methods. In the process of landscape design, an evidence-based approach has also become important. Landscape index estimation using semantic segmentation by deep learning, which can recognize the surrounding environment, has been actively studied for landscape assessment. In this study, semantic segmentation by deep learning was integrated into an MR system to enable dynamic occlusion handling and landscape index estimation for both existing and designed landscape assessment. This system can be operated on a mobile device with video communication over the internet by connecting to real-time semantic segmentation on a high-performance personal computer. The applicability of the developed system is demonstrated through accuracy verification and case studies.