The Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the largest municipality in Japan, routinely conducts building-change identification work. Recently, Tokyo terminated its traditional visual identification work, which had been used for 20 years, and shifted to a new automated system. This paper introduces the Fixed Assets Change Judgment (FACJ) system and its core tool, RealScape. RealScape detects building changes more accurately than visual judgment operations by humans and reduces the labor costs to one third of the traditional approach and the required judgment duration to about two weeks per 100 km2.

The Japanese fixed-property tax is imposed by municipalities on the owners of land, buildings, and depreciation assets (all hereinafter referred to as "fixed assets") on January 1 of every year by calculating the tax sum according to current asset values. This identification work is contracted out to survey companies. The identification of such en over a scale that can cover an actual area of 800 changes is entrusted to survey companies who hire by 600 meters or 500 by 600 meters (variable a large number of workers (figure 1, left). However, depending on the municipality), and every municipality reliance on human labor has led to problems has several hundred photographs that must detailed in the following paragraphs. Under these circumstances, the incentives for It takes about 10 hours to read and interpret a single the municipalities to overcome such challenges by photograph, and the average municipality automating or systematizing the photograph-reading must perform this work for several hundred photographs.