REXplore: A sketch based interactive explorer for real estates using building floor plan images

Abstract

The increasing trend of using online platforms for real estate rent/sale makes automatic retrieval of similar floor plans a key requirement to help architects and buyers alike. Although sketch based image retrieval has been explored in the multimedia community, the problem of hand-drawn floor plan retrieval has been less researched in the past. In this paper, we propose REXplore (Real Estate eXplore), a novel framework that uses sketch based query mode to retrieve corresponding similar floor plan images from a repository using Cyclic Generative Adversarial Networks (Cyclic GAN) for mapping between sketch and image domain. The key contributions of our proposed approach are: (1) a novel sketch based floor plan retrieval framework using an intuitive and convenient sketch query mode; (2) A conjunction of Cyclic GANs and Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) for the task of hand-drawn floor plan image retrieval. Extensive experimentation and comparison with baseline results authenticates our claim.