Random question just popped in my head...doe anyone know of an OCR (optical character recognition) program or website that has good results with old (sometimes hand drawn) construction plans?
Quick answer no. Longer answer from someone who has done only the smallest amount of image recognition, would there be any benefit in the example given off first of all deleting everything that looks like a long straight line, then trying to find anything that might be W, and so on?
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
AutoCAD alone can't do it, but there are extensions and LISP routines that you can use that convert linear areas that look like lines into CAD line segments.
Search "autocad raster vector" turns up a lot of Q&A in the Autodesk knowledgebase.
Acrobat's OCR works pretty well for rectilinear text and boundaries and correctly interprets grids around text as being part of a table; that said, it's not really designed to do OCR on arbitrarily oriented text. In the example below, it was only able to properly recognize text in the upright orientation; upside-down text was OCR'd, but it assumed the text was right side up and resulted in gibberish. So, it basically detected a series of "objects" oriented and arranged as text, but it didn't have the means to determine that the text was upside down. The vertical text is apparently ignored because it already had what it thought was text in the correct orientation. Any one of the text boxes alone would have been OCR'd correctly, because it would find the orientation that results in a good OCR.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!