Yu Hou

University of Southern California | USC · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

The recent surge in diverse 3D datasets spanning various scales and applications marks a significant advancement in the field. However, the comprehensive process of data acquisition, refinement, and annotation at a large scale poses a formidable challenge, particularly for individual researchers and small teams. To this end, we present a novel synt...

Thermal Bridges on Building Rooftops (TBBR) is a multi-channel remote sensing dataset. It was recorded during six separate UAV fly-overs of the city center of Karlsruhe, Germany, and comprises a total of 926 high-resolution images with 6927 manually-provided thermal bridge annotations. Each image provides five channels: three color, one thermograph...

Thermal bridges are weak points of building envelopes that can lead to energy losses, collection of moisture, and formation of mould in the building fabric. To detect thermal bridges of large building stocks, drones with thermographic cameras can be used. As the manual analysis of comprehensive image datasets is very time-consuming, we investigate...

Although various 3D datasets with different functions and scales have been proposed recently, it remains challenging for individuals to complete the whole pipeline of large-scale data collection, sanitization, and annotation. Moreover, the created datasets usually face the challenge of extremely imbalanced class distribution or partial low-quality...

Three-dimensional thermal mapping has been commonly used for building energy performance audits. Many researchers have focused on single building audits and modeling multiple buildings in a large district through aerial images. To solve accuracy and efficiency trade-offs, researchers have used data fusion methods to project information from thermal...

Although various 3D datasets with different functions and scales have been proposed recently, it remains challenging for individuals to complete the whole pipeline of large-scale data collection, sanitization, and annotation. Moreover, the created datasets usually suffer from extremely imbalanced class distribution or partial low-quality data sampl...

As-is building modeling plays an important role in energy audits and retrofits. However, in order to understand the source(s) of energy loss, researchers must know the semantic information of the buildings and outdoor scenes. Thermal information can potentially be used to distinguish objects that have similar surface colors but are composed of diff...

Three-dimensional thermal mapping provides many benefits for auditing building energy performance when compared with two-dimensional thermal images that provide only limited representation. However, the current thermal mapping approaches have accuracy and efficiency tradeoffs when modeling large areas using aerial images. Particularly, low-resoluti...

In recent years, photogrammetry has been widely used in many areas to create photorealistic 3D virtual data representing the physical environment. The innovation of small unmanned aerial vehicles (sUAVs) has provided additional high-resolution imaging capabilities with low cost for mapping a relatively large area of interest. These cutting-edge tec...

Thermal bridges are weak areas of building envelopes that conduct more heat to the outside than surrounding envelope areas. They lead to increased energy consumption and the formation of mold. With a neural network approach, we demonstrate a method of automatically detecting thermal bridges on building rooftops from panorama drone images of whole c...

Segmenting windows and doors on 3D point cloud models allows for heat loss audits around these areas. Researchers have collected aerial images to reconstruct 3D models for large districts, but easily accessible training datasets with data acquired on ground level cannot be directly used for segmentation on 3D models reconstructed by aerial images....

Three-dimensional thermal mapping from aerial images can be used in energy audits. Tie points that define the location of object points in a 3D space for reconstructing a 3D model, also include thermal information, which plays an important role in energy audits. However, it is often harder and less accurate to extract common features and determine...

Multi-sensor imagery data has been used by researchers for the image semantic segmentation of buildings and outdoor scenes. Due to multi-sensor data hunger, researchers have implemented many simulation approaches to create synthetic datasets, and they have also synthesized thermal images because such thermal information can potentially improve segm...

Virtual design team (VDT) is one of the architecture and engineering (A&E) design planning and control methods. Current VDT software is not data-driven like most available methods, and its simulation is based on questionnaires and on designers’ experiences. Managers may end up making decisions using limited information because there is no simple pr...

Infrared Thermography (IRT) is a widely used non-destructive method for energy audits. However, plenty of research indicates that the performance of passive thermography is influenced by the method of data collection. Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) has been successfully employed for conducting RGB photogrammetry, but the data collected from an inf...