查看文章

Until today, for the conceptual design of architectural floor plans, architects widely follow the traditional pen and paper based method to draw the conceptual floor plans, and retrieve the similar floor plans in the printed reference collections. In this paper we present a complete end-to-end system that helps architects to retrieve similar floor plans in early design phases. This work makes a three-fold contribution. Firstly, we have adapted three state of the art techniques to retrieve the similar floor plans: case-based reasoning (CBR), exact graph matching, and inexact graph matching. Secondly, we conducted a test to detect the computational limits of the searching techniques. And finally, we performed a qualitative analysis by running more realistic test cases created by architects while keeping in mind the computational limits. For visualization of results, we have integrated advanced version of our previously implemented web-based user interface. The qualitative analysis showed that the exact graph matching gives in general better results for a majority of test cases, as compared to other two methods. The novelty of our approach is that it combines CBR, exact, and inexact graph matching in one system in the domain of retrieval of architectural floor plans.