Revealing connectivity in residential Architecture: An algorithmic approach to extracting adjacency matrices from floor plans

Abstract

In today's world, various approaches and parameters exist for designing a plan and determining its spatial, placement. Hence, various modes for identifying crucial locations can be explored when an architectural plan is designed in different dimensions. While designing all these modes takes considerable time, there are numerous potential applications for artificial intelligence (AI) in this domain. This study aims to compute and use an adjacency matrix to generate architectural residential plans. Additionally, it develops a plan generation algorithm in Rhinoceros software, utilizing the Grasshopper plugin to create a dataset of architectural plans. In the following step, the data was entered into a neural network to identify the architectural plan's type, furniture, icons, and use of spaces, which was achieved using YOLOv4, EfficientDet, YOLOv5, DetectoRS, and RetinaNet. The algorithm's execution, testing, and training were conducted using Darknet and PyTorch. The research dataset comprises 12,000 plans, with 70% employed in the training phase and 30% in the testing phase. The network was appropriately trained practically and precisely in relation to an average precision (AP) resulting of 91.50%. After detecting the types of space use, the main research algorithm has been designed and coded, which includes determining the adjacency matrix of architectural plan spaces in seven stages. All research processes were conducted in Python, including dataset preparation, network object detection, and adjacency matrix algorithm design. Finally, the adjacency matrix is given to the input of the proposed plan generator network, which consequently, based on the resulting adjacency, obtains different placement modes for spaces and furniture.