Textile designers rely on images to fuel their creativity

18 Feb '08

2 min read

The University of Dundee is working alongside major partners including fashion house Liberty and the Victoria & Albert Museum to bridge the gap between the digital and material worlds for textile designers.

Researchers in the School of Computing at Dundee are leading the £1.4 million project to develop new systems of image-based retrieval. These are systems which work like a sophisticated visual version of text-based search engines, using pictures instead of words to seek out new images.

The system can draw out comparable images across dozens of factors, providing everything from exact matches to more abstract choices that may provide a creative spark.

Fashion and Apparel Browsing for Inspirational Content (FABRIC) is a three-year £1.4M project funded by the Technology Strategy Board, Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR), (formerly the Department of Trade & Industry).

Aimed at the textile industry, the goal of FABRIC is to design new technologies, techniques, and tools to make navigating images more intuitive, allowing user-directed browsing while enhancing creativity, design, product development, and marketing.

"The relationship between art images and the creative industries is indisputable," said Dr Annette Ward, Scottish Power Research Fellow & Development Manager in the School of Computing at the University.

Click here to read more details:

University of Dundee

More Textiles News - Scotland...