New search engine for textile designers
The University of Dundee has teamed up with fashion house Liberty and the Victoria and Albert Museum, among others, to work on a project that will help textile designers find the images they need quickly and easily.
Researchers at the University’s School of Computing are leading the £1.4 million, three-year project to develop new systems of image-based retrieval, which will allow users to draw out comparable images across dozens of search criteria, providing exact matches as well as more abstract options.
The project, named Fashion and Apparel Browsing for Inspirational Content (FABRIC) will eventually see software for desktop, mobile phones and handheld computers developed.
Scottish Power research fellow and development manager in the School of Computing, Dr Annette Ward, says: “Designers rely on images to fuel their creativity. Unfortunately, the visually complex and abstract nature of many designs mean that they are often hard to describe when cataloguing, and as a result, they maybe very difficult to access.”
More than 40,000 images from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s digital collection will be incorporated into the browsing database, including images showing continuous and discontinuous pattern repetition (prints, florals, plaids, stripes and lace fabrics; tiles; mosaics; grillwork; wallpaper; embroidery; stained glass; carpets; and rugs.
