Automated building typology clustering and identification using a variational autoencoder on digital land cadastres

• Novel VAE-based method extracts urban building typologies automatically. • No prior knowledge or manual labelling is required for typology identification. • The method enables efficient large-scale and urban seismic vulnerability assessment. • The method produces typology-specific ML models for enhanced structural analysis. • The method is applicable to digital land cadastres for various urban studies. This study introduces a novel, fully automated methodology for extracting urban building typologies from digital land cadastres using a Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Unlike traditional shape clustering approaches, that depend on predefined rules or manual labelling, the method employs unsupervised learning to identify building typologies, based solely on geometric features, derived from roof-print shapes. Leveraging a large-scale dataset of over 100,000 buildings from the Seville, Spain cadastre, the VAE has been trained and augmented to generate a latent space that captures dominant morphological patterns. The analysis has revealed 24 to 26 distinct building typologies, encompassing both prevalent and rare urban forms. The approach effectively filters out non-representative shapes and is scalable for application across entire cities. By automatically identifying representative building shapes, the method facilitates the creation of parametric structural models, which are essential for developing machine learning tools to predict seismic damage. This replicable and automated strategy significantly reduces the time and resources required for typology-based seismic vulnerability assessments, providing valuable support for civil protection agencies and urban planners.