Facade Segmentation for Solar Photovoltaic Suitability (Papers Track)
Ayca Duran (ETH Zurich); Christoph Waibel (VITO); Bernd Bickel (ETH Zurich); Iro Armeni (Stanford University); Arno Schlueter (ETH Zurich)
Abstract
Building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) facades represent a promising pathway towards urban decarbonization, especially where roof areas are insufficient and ground‑mounted arrays are infeasible. Although machine learning-based approaches to support photovoltaic (PV) planning on rooftops are well researched, automated approaches for facades still remain scarce and oversimplified. This paper therefore presents a pipeline that integrates detailed information on the architectural composition of the facade to automatically identify suitable surfaces for PV application and estimate the solar energy potential. The pipeline fine-tunes SegFormer-B5 on the CMP Facades dataset and converts semantic predictions into facade-level PV suitability masks and PV panel layouts considering module sizes and clearances. Applied to a dataset of 373 facades with known dimensions from ten cities, the results show that deployable BIPV potential is significantly lower than theoretical potential, thus providing valuable insights for reliable urban energy planning. With the growing availability of facade imagery, the proposed pipeline can be scaled to support PV planning in cities worldwide.