Extracting UML models from images

Software modeling is an active field of research. In this field, UML is considered the standard for software modeling. Studying UML models is important to understand their effectiveness in software development. Ideally, researchers want to study UML models from documentations from industrial software projects. Given their limited availability, we resort to collecting UML models from internet. A big problem for studies of UML models is that UML models are published mostly in image formats (such as JPEG). These images do not include the model information that is available for UML models when saved in a CASE (Computer Automated Software Engineering) tool format or the XML-based version of the UML interchange format: XMI. Current CASE tools cannot recognize information from images. In this paper we propose the Img2UML tool to solve this problem. The Img2UML extracts UML Class models from images such that these models can be loaded into CASE tools for further study. The Img2UML tool exports UML Class models into XMI files which can be read with the StarUML CASE tool. We performed a validation which shows that Img2UML successfully handles a large class of UML Class images.