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Researchers at  Dundee University are working with fashion house Liberty and the Victoria & Albert Museum to help build image retrieval systems to help textile designers.

Engineers in the School of Computing at Dundee are leading the £1.4m project which aims to build sophisticated image-based versions of a text-based search engine.

Fashion and Apparel Browsing for Inspirational Content (FABRIC), as the project is called, has been funded by the Technology Strategy Board, Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR), (formerly the Department of Trade & Industry).

'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 may be very difficult to access. What we are looking to develop are systems that don’t rely on words to extract the images designers are looking for, but rather use elements of the visual image,' said Dr Annette Ward, Scottish Power research fellow and development manager in the School of Computing at the University.