Information extraction from tabular drawings
Sanjay Balasubramanian, Surekha Chandran, Juan F. Arias, Rangachar Kasturi, Atul K. K. Chhabra · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1994
This paper presents efficient methodologies to extract information from tabular drawings representing telephone cable interconnections. These tables include records of cable counts, cables in service, assignment charts, and cable running and wiring lists. An interesting problem in these drawings is that the changes to the data are occasionally recorded by crossing out entries and appending the changes rather than redrawing the entire documents. The objective of the work described here is the extraction of information contained in these table structured documents to facilitate the creation of a computer database. Our software system makes use of contextual information in these drawings (e.g., a particular line pattern is used to represent repeated entries, ignore crossed-out entries, etc.). The system uses features like inter-line spacing, length of lines, line orientation, and start and end locations of the lines to detect the diagonal lines and vertical lines with demarcations. Experimental results are also included.