Extracting geometric information from architectural drawings

Abstract

We describe some experiments on a geometric problem encountered while developing a tool for predicting the behavior of indoor wireless communications systems. The problem is to extract information about the walls of a building from a machine-readable description. These descriptions contain much irrelevant or redundant information; the task is to eliminate the former and to reduce the amount of the latter. A key geometric idea is to use plane sweep to find line segments in the drawing that belong to the same wall. A great gulf lies between this simple idea and its realization, however, and any solution must involve a tradeoff among factors like accuracy, speed, and the degree and nature of human intervention.