Computer vision for building intelligence
The Building Safety Act 2022 changed everything. Manual compliance checking cannot keep up with the golden thread requirements for higher-risk buildings. AI can.
The Building Safety Act changed everything
The Building Safety Act 2022 introduced the most significant reform to building safety regulations in a generation. For higher-risk buildings, the requirements are substantial.
The Act applies to residential buildings with seven or more storeys, or those exceeding 18 metres in height. It introduces the concept of the “golden thread” - comprehensive, continuously updated documentation that traces every material change to a building design from initial concept through operation and maintenance.
Maintaining this golden thread manually is not viable at scale. The administrative burden of tracking every design change, flagging implications for fire safety, structural stability, and accessibility, and generating updated compliance documentation requires automation.
This is where computer vision and AI deliver transformative value - not as a replacement for professional judgement, but as a tool that surfaces the information architects and safety teams need, faster and more reliably than manual processes.
Golden Thread Requirement
Continuous audit log of every design change, with auto-flagged implications for regulated aspects of building safety.
Higher-Risk Building Regime
Enhanced oversight for residential buildings of 7+ storeys or 18m+ height, with mandatory gateway approvals at design, construction, and completion stages.
Building Safety Regulator
New regulator within the HSE responsible for overseeing the safety and performance of all buildings, with specific powers for higher-risk buildings.
Duty Holder Obligations
Clear accountability chain from client through principal designer and contractor, with ongoing responsibilities throughout the building lifecycle.
BIM Integration
Digital building models increasingly expected as part of the golden thread, enabling automated compliance checking against thousands of code requirements.
Manual process vs. AI-powered analysis
Every stage of design review and compliance checking is fundamentally changed when computer vision is applied to architectural documents.
Compliance Review
Before
Hours of manual checking against building codes. Error-prone, slow, and expensive.
With AI
Automated scanning in seconds. AI flags non-compliance issues before they become costly rework.
Hours to seconds
Floorplan Analysis
Before
Architects manually measure, annotate, and cross-reference layouts against regulations.
With AI
Computer vision extracts room boundaries, door positions, and measurements automatically.
95%+ accuracy
Golden Thread Documentation
Before
Fragmented records across teams. No single source of truth for design decisions.
With AI
Continuous audit log with auto-flagged implications for fire safety, structural stability, and accessibility.
Full traceability
Design Iteration
Before
Compliance feedback arrives late in the process, forcing expensive redesigns.
With AI
Real-time compliance checking as designs evolve. Issues detected and flagged immediately.
Shift-left validation
Purpose-built for architectural analysis
General-purpose AI models are not production-ready for architecture, engineering, and construction tasks. We build domain-specific pipelines that combine multiple models for reliable, accurate results.
Real-time detection of architectural elements - doors, windows, walls, stairs, fire exits, and accessibility features - across floorplan images and BIM exports.
Segment Anything Model for precise boundary detection of rooms, zones, and spatial regions. Pixel-level accuracy for measurement and area calculations.
Vision-language model for classifying architectural elements by function and context. Connects visual features to regulatory requirements using natural language.
Core image processing pipelines for boundary detection, measurement extraction, perspective correction, and coordinate system alignment.
Custom training workflows for continuous accuracy improvement. Domain-specific fine-tuning on architectural datasets to exceed general-purpose model performance.
High-performance API serving predictions at scale. Async processing for batch analysis of large document sets with real-time progress tracking.
From floorplan to compliance report
A typical document goes through multiple analysis stages, each adding a layer of intelligence to the final output.
Ingest
PDF, DWG, IFC, or image upload. Format detection and preprocessing.
Detect
YOLO identifies architectural elements. Doors, walls, stairs, exits.
Segment
SAM extracts room boundaries. Pixel-level precision for measurements.
Classify
CLIP maps elements to regulatory categories. Context-aware labelling.
Report
Compliance findings, measurements, and flagged issues in structured output.
Arcus: AI-powered building intelligence
Arcus needed a system that could analyse floorplans for compliance and design errors faster and more reliably than manual review. Architects and safety teams were spending hours on checks that should take minutes.
We built an AI platform combining YOLO for object detection, SAM for segmentation, and CLIP for classification, with OpenCV pipelines handling boundary detection and measurement extraction. Custom training workflows ensure the system gets more accurate over time with domain-specific data.
Proof that AI, when trained and tuned properly, can transform an industry.
Review time
Before
Hours per document
After
Seconds per document
Compliance confidence
Before
Dependent on reviewer experience
After
Consistent, measurable accuracy
Design decisions
Before
Feedback late in the process
After
Safer, smarter decisions earlier in projects
Build smarter. Comply faster.
Whether you are an architecture practice, a construction firm, or a proptech startup, we can help you apply computer vision and AI to your compliance and design review workflows.