Architectural designers are voracious consumers of visual images, which play a crucial role especially in conceptual and creative design. Consequently architectural education revolves around visual references. Yet key word, texture and color retrieval schemes do not suit designers' needs. Designers need shape based retrieval that is driven by free hand drawing, and ways to integrate retrieved images into their design environment. The paper describes Drawing Analogies, an image retrieval scheme for design based on the need for image retrieval that can be integrated with the act of free hand drawing. Our scheme does not perform feature extraction of stored images, but relies on users to create an index of diagram keys. Automatic and semi-automatic feature extraction from database images would be a useful extension of our Drawing Analogies system, but likely would not supplant the need for designer's supervision of the indexing process.

Electronic Cocktail Napkin