Object Detection and Text Recognition in Large-scale Technical Drawings

Abstract

In this digital transformation era, the demand for automatic pattern extraction from printed materials has never been higher, making it one of the most eminent problems nowadays. In this paper, we propose a new method for pattern recognition in highly complex technical drawings. Our method is a pipeline system that includes two phases: (1) detecting the objects that contain the patterns of interest with improvements to processing large-scale image, and (2) performing character recognition on the objects if they are text patterns with improvements to post-processing task. Our experiments on nearly five thousand real technical drawings show promising results and the capability to reduce manual labeling effort to a great extent.