Interpreting images of architecture, drawings for building cost estimation

Estimating the financial cost of constructing proposed buildings is an important task which occupies a significant proportion of the working lives of many architects. The majority of the costing process can, however, be automated. Software exists which, given a structural description of the building concerned in some standard format, can produce reliable estimates of total cost. The rapidly increasing use of CAD systems, for example, has generated a need to convert paper drawings into an appropriate electronic format. A considerable number of workers have employed image analysis techniques in attempts to automate this type of activity. Automatic extraction of building cost data from grey level images of architectural drawings is an attractive proposition. A review of the relevant literature and communication with members of the international drawing interpretation community, however, has revealed no previous work on the interpretation of architectural drawings. We present initial results of an project aimed at the recovery of high level descriptions of building designs from images of architectural drawings. For the present, attention is focused on Taiwanese drawings. The style and particular features of these documents, which differ somewhat from other engineering line drawings, are first discussed. The proposed interpretation strategy is then described. A prototype system has been implemented and applied to a number of scanned drawings; the results of these experiments are presented and discussed