Subjective Functionality and Comfort Prediction for Apartment Floor Plans and Its Application to Intuitive Online Property Search

This paper presents a new user experience for online apartment search using functionality and comfort as query items. Specifically, it has three technical contributions. First, we present a new dataset on the perceived functionality and comfort scores of residential floor plans using nine question statements about the level of comfort, openness, privacy, etc. Second, we propose an algorithm to predict the scores from the floor plan images. Lastly, we implement a new apartment search system and conduct a large-scale usability study using crowdsourcing. The experimental results show that our apartment search system can provide a better user experience. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a highly accurate machine learning model for predicting the subjective functionality and comfort of apartments.