A knowledge-based system for automatic measurement of steel reinforcement

This paper presents a computer system, namely VHSTATION, for automatically recognizing and measuring steel reinforcement from vectorised structural drawings. This system utilizes rules extracted based on the feature of structural drawings to support the interpretation of drawing elements and the relationship between the elements. The paper presents the rules extracted for recognizing symbols and reinforcement steel. The use of the rules is illustrated with various examples. An innovative method, which is called the enhanced gravity field relationship method (EGFRM), is developed in order to recognize the information needed for calculating reinforcement steel. The system is fully implemented and commercially available.