Innovative Production Machines and Systems Conference

The TRENDS European project aims at developing an image and text retrieval engine in order to support the activity of the car designers in the early stages of their design process. The study of the designers’ activity has led us to the production of an image database in which designers will find inspirational material. This database includes many visual and text material, decomposed in sectors; these sectors are adapted to the main domains in which the car designers find their influences and inspiration sources. This paper focuses on the methodology followed for the elaboration of this image database and proposes an expert evaluation of its content, as long as a discussion on the methodology deployed.