This research paper reports the process and results of a project to automatically classify historical and non-historical buildings using airborne and satellite imagery. The case study area is the center of Yazd, the most important historical site in Iran. New computational scientific methods and accessibility to satellite images have created more opportunities to work on automated historical architecture feature recognition. Building on this, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is the main method for the classification task of the project. The most distinctive features of the historical houses in Iran are central courtyards. Based on this characteristic, the objective of the research is recognizing and labeling the houses as historical buildings by a CNN model. As a result, the trained model is tested by a validation dataset and has an accuracy rate of around 98%. In Sum, the reported project is one of the first works on deep learning methods in historical Iranian architecture study and one of the first efforts to use automated remote sensing techniques for recognizing historical courtyard houses in aerial images.

Central courtyards are primary components of vernacular architecture in Iran. The directions, dimensions, ratios, and other characteristics of central courtyards are critical for studying historical passive cooling and heating solutions. Several studies on central courtyards have compared their features in different cities and climatic zones in Iran. In this study, deep learning methods for object detection and image segmentation are applied to aerial images, to extract the features of central courtyards. The case study explores aerial images of nine historical cities in Bsk, Bsh, Bwk, and Bwh Köppen climate zones. Furthermore, these features were gathered in an extensive dataset, with 26,437 samples and 76 geometric and climatic features. Additionally, the data analysis methods reveal significant correlations between various features, such as the length and width of courtyards. In all cities, the correlation coefficient between these two characteristics is approximately +0.88. Numerous mathematical equations are generated for each city and climate zone by fitting the linear regression model to these data in different cities and climate zones. These equations can be used as proposed design models to assist designers and researchers in predicting and locating the best courtyard houses in Iran’s historical regions.