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

Architects' daily routine means working with drawings. 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 DFKI's 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 prototype only sketches with a predefined structure are recognized, we will extend the system to work with normal floor plans.