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OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

getanchorgrid.com

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Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#51

Post by h317 »

I cannot wait for the day when tech companies become players in the construction industry because it looks like it is the only way forward to make a change.

To think that everything has been digitalized a long time ago, yet contract law cannot properly deal with delineating responsibilities between GC and Architects, who are still sending 2D drawings to each other.

Imagine, all this information about quantities and door types (and everything else) is already available and produced by the architect's team, BUT they cannot share it! Because if they do, they are responsible for the numbers in case something is wrong.

So now there is this circus of: Arch technologist making the base drawing with doors. GC receives documents, counts doors for verification, and sends them to the sub. Subcontractor looks at these drawings, counts them again, and sends data to the supplier. Guess what, the supplier also looks, counts, confirms, and back we go.

Though I think robotics will change all of that. And when we have some sort of bot assistance, big tech players will have a bigger leverage in this, which will lead to the proper change management architecture.

Anyway, cool product. Anything to help with estimation. Really hope it gets traction.

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#53

Post by punnerud »

«Why we did it»; would rather have a “How we did it”. The why gave me AI generated marketing material feelings.

Tailscale’s article about NAT traversal is an example of how to write “how we did it”: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#54

Post by wcisco17 »

i18nagentai wrote: post #42

[flagged]

Yeah OCR for technical is largely solved we're targeting the construction documents space For construction specs we have a few endpoints: - https://www.getanchorgrid.com/developer/docs/endpoints/specs... - https://www.getanchorgrid.com/developer/docs/endpoints/specs...

so you would want these documents translated lets say to German, mandarin, ect?

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#55

Post by punnerud »

h317 wrote: post #51

I cannot wait for the day when tech companies become players in the construction industry because it looks like it is the only way forward to make a change. To think that everything has been digitalized a long time ago, yet contract law cannot properly deal with delineating responsibilities between GC and Architects, who are still sending 2D drawings to each other. Imagine, all this information about quantities and d…

I had a job as HVAC engineer for the upgraded Oslo Airport back in 2011; started doing HVAC work for 3 weeks the rest was programming trying to make the rest of people more efficient. Made an Excel sheet with a lot of macros to manage all the drawing of the airport. That’s why I switched to programming when I continued to study, and did not want to come back before I got more experience.

They even gave me a big desk at Trondheim/Tyholt so I could help them with the software during my studies.

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#56

Post by runxel »

sreekanth850 wrote: post #39

We’re taking a different path, building a parsing engine that converts CAD (DWG/DXF) into fully structured JSON with preserved semantics (no ML in the critical path).We also have a separate GIS parser that extracts vector data (features, layers, geometries) independently, Like to know how you handle consistency and reproducibility across runs using models and how you make it affordable, especially at scale. because a…

Dumbcad line barf will not help you with that at all.

There already is a format that is plain text and preserves the semantics: IFC. That's what it was made for.

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#57

Post by ndespres »

h317 wrote: post #51

I cannot wait for the day when tech companies become players in the construction industry because it looks like it is the only way forward to make a change. To think that everything has been digitalized a long time ago, yet contract law cannot properly deal with delineating responsibilities between GC and Architects, who are still sending 2D drawings to each other. Imagine, all this information about quantities and d…

I’ve worked on projects where a lot of work was done in highly collaborative drawings on Bluebeam, in which vendors add their markups and items and the program facilitates counting it all at the end of the phase. My role was only in things like wireless AP placement and low voltage cabling drop locations, not anything safety critical like doors, but I assume those vendors were able to keep track of those items in a similar way. For actual engineering projects I’m glad so many people have to take the time to count.

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#58

Post by eMPee584 »

instig007 wrote: post #41
jsidney wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a small set of construction stakeholders participate in the CAD ecosystem (e.g., architects, large GCs) while a broader set of stakeholders (subcontractors, trades, smaller GCs/CMs) do not receive BIM files and work with PDFs. CAD/BIM is a wonderful aspiration but for many the reality is PDFs.

Re. "CAD/BIM", technically speaking CAD doesn't imply BIM, and the industry's promotion of BIM is akin to AI promotion among software engineering teams - the benefits aren't clear upon detailed review of the advertised capabilities. The CAD part, on the other hand, is generally recognized as the essential tooling for the profession and I'm surprised to hear that it just is a "wonderful aspiration".

"The profession" actually is a wide variety of trades, not just architects and contractors. Electricians, plumbers etc. where CAD is not yet widely spread. Which hopefully will change in the near future, with open source BIM tool chains, boosted by generative/agentic AI.. Finally, a huge source of confusion and execution hiccups will be overcome.

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#59

Post by siriusfeynman »

cyanydeez wrote: post #34
wang_li wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the workflow lie at the level of a real or virtual piece of paper and not in the metadata from the applications used to create that piece of paper? Seems like a CAD tool would allow you to identify each element of the drawing, assigning metadata as required.

Oh you sweet summer child. These draws are anywhere from 0 to 120 years old and might just be something pulled out of a floppy disk from 1970 to scanned in coffee ridden pieces of paper sitting in a desk folded a hundred times. The world in which metadata is a common thing attached to any file doesn't exist, and probably never will, no matter how much you try to improve CAD work flow.

> Oh you sweet summer child

I know you're just repeating a phrase from a TV show but do you know how incredibly condescending this comes across to most people?

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#60

Post by wcisco17 »

petee wrote: post #49

I ran the example doors given and it missed 9 swinging doors, some that were in double swing pairs, and a few that were just out on their own not clustered. Not bad overall though

Yep we're constantly improving we're currently above 0.87 for doors

we're thinking of adding a params for the ROC curve so that you can decide your own optimal thresholds depend on when false positive true positive rate is acceptable

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