A prototype system for interpreting hand-sketched floor plans

A prototype system for drawing interpretation that automatically converts hand-sketched floor-plans into the CAD format is presented. The main problems in interpreting hand-sketched drawings are positional ambiguity and shape distortion. In the proposed method, positional ambiguity is able to be corrected in a nearest grid-location manner because floor-plan elements are normally drawn on/along grid lines that correspond to the modular proportions. Shape distortion is able to be corrected by template-matching of closed regions because architectural elements mostly consist of one or more closed regions of basic figures: triangles, squares, circles, and so on. The system was tested using 150 floor-plan drawings hand-sketched by three subjects without the use of rulers or templates. The results showed that sufficient recognition performance for practical use was able to be obtained.