Visual Description of the Indoor Space of Real Estate in Crowd-Sourcing Environments

Emerging the power of collective intelligence through crowdsourcing could create a clear path for visualizing real estate as well. One of the Crowdsourcing applications is describing the indoor space of a real estate. This paper aims to describe real estate in the context of spatial crowdsourcing. Qualitative and quantitative criteria were used in this study to describe the real estate space, topological relationships, directional relations, color, location, dimensions, and height as qualitative criteria. Quantitative criteria were selected as the dimensions and height. The proposed model was evaluated by two groups: those who had never seen the real estate and others that had already seen the same real estate. We implemented a website called SAMA¹ to evaluate the proposed model with crowdsourcing data using online collaborative tools. SAMA is using tools, such as a sketch plan, photo, text, virtual tour, and visual descriptions. To evaluate SAMA, we compared it with four representative commercial websites, and the impact of the tools was precisely examined. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed model can be utilized to visually describe the indoor space of real estate in crowd-sourcing environments.