Annotating floor plans using deformable polygons

Abstract

The ability to recognize regions in a bitmap image has applications in various areas, from document recognition of scanned building floor plans to processing of scanned forms. We consider the use of deformable polygons for delineating partially or fully bounded regions of a scanned bitmap that depicts a building floor plan. We discuss a semi-automated interactive system, in which a user positions a seed polygon in an area of interest in the image. The computer then expands and deforms the polygon in an attempt to minimize an energy function that is defined so that configurations with minimum energy tend to match the subjective boundaries of regions in the image. When the deformation process is completed, the user may edit the deformed polygon to make it conform more closely to the desired region. In contrast to area-filling techniques for delineating areal regions of images, our approach works robustly for partially bounded regions.