BIM Product Style Classification and Retrieval Based on Long-Range Style Dependencies

Abstract

The rapid increase in building components on the building information model (BIM) object database has created new demand for BIM product recommendations to improve design efficiency. Current efforts mainly focus on the shape and contents of the products, instead of stylistic consistency, which is a crucial factor during the practical design process. To tackle such a problem, this paper proposes a novel framework to capture stylistic features based on long-range design dependencies with structural preservation, of which the snapshots of BIM products have been used to extract the stylistic features; core patches with strong style, generated by the pre-trained saliency model, are the root nodes; stylistic correlations are calculated as the hyperedges by tree-based operations; deep features and design features are proposed to represent the low-level and style distribution based on the study of design theory; and an ensemble learning strategy is introduced to solve the unbalanced classifier performance. An ablation study is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, in which comparative experiments with state-of-the-art baselines demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method.