Building Project Information Search by Images

Résumé 0

Building product information is required during the architectural design and technicaldesign. The common access to the technical information system is the multi-criteriasearch mode. This search mode is adapted to the situation where an architect has a precisedemand of information. But most of the time, the architect looks for ideas and wants toobtain many illustrations of product uses. Therefore, the system has to propose anothersearch mode adapted to the situation where the demand is still fuzzy. Considering that thearchitect 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 forideas. The web is an inexhaustible resource of images we can exploit to provision animage database on a specific area. The system we propose allows making buildingproduct information search with images extracted from the web. This article presents themethod used to extract images from web sites of French building product companies andhow these images are used in an interactive and progressive image retrieval process.