1Building product information search by images

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