a.SCAtch – A Sketch-Based Retrieval for Architectural Floor Plans

a.SCAtch – A Sketch-Based Retrieval for Architectural Floor Plans
Markus Weber, Marcus Liwicki, Andreas Dengel
12th International Conference on Frontiers of Handwriting Recognition International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR-2010), November 16-18, Kolkata, India

Abstract:

Architects daily routine means working with draw- ings. They use either a pen or a computer sketching their ideas or drawing to scale. When beginning a new project they often have to search for similar projects in the past. In this paper a sketch-based approach is proposed to query the floor plan repository. The user searches for semantically similar floor plans just by drawing the new plan. An algorithm extracts the semantic structure sketched by the architect on DFKIs Touch & Write table and compares the structure of the sketch with the ones from the floor plan repository. The a.SCatch system enables the user to easily access knowledge from past projects. While in the current pro- totype only sketches with a predefined structure are recognized, we will extend the system to work with normal floor plans.

Keywords:

Sketch-based interfaces