Building Project Information Search by Images
Résumé :
Building product information is required during the architectural design and technical
design. The common access to the technical information system is the multi-criteria
search mode. This search mode is adapted to the situation where an architect has a precise
demand of information. But most of the time, the architect looks for ideas and wants to
obtain many illustrations of product uses. Therefore, the system has to propose another
search mode adapted to the situation where the demand is still fuzzy. Considering that the
architect has the capacity to think with image and that an image can generate easily ideas,
then a search by images seems to be suitable to the situation where an architect looks for
ideas. The web is an inexhaustible resource of images we can exploit to provision an
image database on a specific area. The system we propose allows making building
product information search with images extracted from the web. This article presents the
method used to extract images from web sites of French building product companies and
how these images are used in an interactive and progressive image retrieval process.