Hand drawn document understanding using the straight line Hough transform and graph matching

This paper presents a system to understand hand drawn architectural drawings in a CAD environment. The procedure is to identify in a floor plan the building elements, stored in a library of patterns, and their spatial relationships. The vectorized input document and the patterns to recognize are represented by attributed graphs. To recognize the patterns as such, we apply a structural approach based on subgraph isomorphism techniques. In spite of their value, graph matching techniques do not recognize adequately those building elements characterized by hatching patterns, i.e. walls. Here we focus on the recognition of hatching patterns and develop a straight line Hough transform based method in order to detect the regions filled in with parallel straight fines. This allows not only to recognize filling patterns, but it actually reduces the computational load associated with the subgraph isomorphism computation. The result is that the document can be redrawn by editing all the patterns recognized