PropertyPortrait

A tool for generating beautiful descriptions for real estate ads using photos

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Inspiration

AI is everywhere these days, but when it comes to such an old-school domain as real estate, we must face the necessity of creating boring descriptions and endless lists describing a property. With the power of CV we might make the process of creating an ad significantly faster and cheaper: what if everything we had to do was to take several photos?

What it does

Our web service extracts features (i.e. furniture, appliances, elements of design) from an interior and exterior photos and generates a nice description out of it. Also it reminds when you forget to show some rooms, i.e. bathroom or corridor. You only need to fill some necessary information such as price, location and permissions. And finally you are able to share your ad into social networks.

How we built it

We used restb.ai API for feature extraction and organized it at backend written on Flask. Then we created a responsive frontend part with the use of React to be able to add photos and change descriptions at realtime.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was the description generation itself. There are so many features that can be used in an ad for real estate market and plenty of them can be retrieved from photos. Also we ran into troubles with Amazon S3 and decided to make our own small database based on Flask.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to create a finished prototype of a web service: including frontend, backend and use of external API. We managed to generate smooth texts based on retrieved features - so it looks like a real ad.

What we learned

We learned a lot about collaboration in a small full-stack team. Also it was our first time using such features as restb.ai provides, and also for some team members React was not so familiar: frontend was the most complex part and we worked together on it.

What's next for PropertyPortrait

There are several more ideas that we want to implement: i.e. warnings about sensitive information located on a photo (faces, phone numbers, etc), more flexible forms for basic information, more types of features that can be extracted. And finally, some ad services provide tools for automatic creation of ads and it would be interesting to integrate our app to them.

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