*** Furick 9521774 This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will create algorithms and software to convert legacy paper blueprints into electronic forms. At present, there is no seamless way to transfer paper blueprints into electronic form. Existing automatic transfer methods often are error-prone and fail to capture important semantic content of the drawings. Most transfers to electronic form now occur by manually tracing paper blueprints into electronic form. This is expensive and unreliable. As a result, examination and assessment of existing structures is limited, especially in time of crisis or after a failure has occurred. During this Phase II program, new algorithms will be created to improve the speed and accuracy of raster to vector conversions. A second goal of the program will be to capture this geometry and text in knowledge-based object formats. The overall research objective is to create frameworks, methods and software that can be used by a practicing engineer who is not a computer expert. This Phase II program will permit modern computer based analysis of existing paper blueprints. The software developed will have important commercial potential in helping earthquake analysis, failure predictions, as well as use in everyday translation and storage of archival drawings.
