Relational Models for visual understanding of graphical documents. Application to architectural drawings

Abstract

Graphical documents express complex concepts using a visual language. This language consists of a vocabulary (symbols) and a syntax (structural relations between symbols) that articulate a semantic meaning in a certain context. Therefore, the automatic interpretation by computers of these sort of documents entails three main steps: the detection of the symbols, the extraction of the structural relations between these symbols, and the modeling of the knowledge that permits the extraction of the semantics. Different domains in graphical documents include: architectural and engineering drawings, maps, flowcharts, etc.