CTWSeg: component-level semantic segmentation of the Ming city wall with a geometry-aware weakly supervised framework

City walls in ancient urban systems served as vital military defenses and symbols of political legitimacy. Although point cloud segmentation has become a key tool in heritage conservation, most studies focus on overall geometric reconstruction and lack component-level semantic understanding of large brick-and-stone structures. We present CTW3D-Parts, a component-level benchmark for Ming city wall point clouds derived from UAV-based multi-view photogrammetry, with seven component categories and standardized annotations. Building on it, we propose CTWSeg, a geometry-aware weakly supervised framework integrating geometric feature encoding, direction-aware structural attention, and confidence-controlled pseudo-label optimization. Using only 0.1% labeled points, CTWSeg achieves 93.14% OA, 86.33% mAcc, and 71.11% mIoU on CTW3D-Parts, ranking highest in OA and mIoU among evaluated methods. Experiments on the ARCH dataset further indicate its robustness. This work provides a benchmark and an effective framework for fine-grained semantic analysis and digital conservation of large-scale architectural heritage.

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Publication Details

Journal
npj Heritage Science
Published
2026-11-06
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s40494-026-03086-2
Primary Topic
3D Surveying and Cultural Heritage
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

CTWSeg: component-level semantic segmentation of the Ming city wall with a geometry-aware weakly supervised framework

Tengping Jiang, Jiahao Fu, L Zhang, Yongjun Wang et al.
5 links
npj Heritage Science
3D Surveying and Cultural Heritage
article

CTWSeg: component-level semantic segmentation of the Ming city wall with a geometry-aware weakly supervised framework

Tengping Jiang, Jiahao Fu, L Zhang, Yongjun Wang, Wenfei Hu, Shan Liu
article en

Abstract

City walls in ancient urban systems served as vital military defenses and symbols of political legitimacy. Although point cloud segmentation has become a key tool in heritage conservation, most studies focus on overall geometric reconstruction and lack component-level semantic understanding of large brick-and-stone structures. We present CTW3D-Parts, a component-level benchmark for Ming city wall point clouds derived from UAV-based multi-view photogrammetry, with seven component categories and standardized annotations. Building on it, we propose CTWSeg, a geometry-aware weakly supervised framework integrating geometric feature encoding, direction-aware structural attention, and confidence-controlled pseudo-label optimization. Using only 0.1% labeled points, CTWSeg achieves 93.14% OA, 86.33% mAcc, and 71.11% mIoU on CTW3D-Parts, ranking highest in OA and mIoU among evaluated methods. Experiments on the ARCH dataset further indicate its robustness. This work provides a benchmark and an effective framework for fine-grained semantic analysis and digital conservation of large-scale architectural heritage.

npj Heritage Science
Nanjing Normal University (CN), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN), Jiangsu Center for Collaborative Innovation in Geographical Information Resource Development and Application (CN), Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (CN), State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System (CN)
National Natural Science Foundation of China, Government of Jiangsu Province, Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System
Sustainable cities and communities
Openalex Percentile: Top 18%
3D Surveying and Cultural Heritage
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