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.
Authors
- Tengping Jiang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0104-1969)
- Jiahao Fu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-9374-9660)
- L Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8749-7459)
- Yongjun Wang
- Wenfei Hu
- Shan Liu
Institutions
- 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)
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
Funders
- 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