An Approach for Detecting Circular Callouts in Architectural, Engineering and Constructional Drawing Documents

A set of documents, while creating a building structure, containing the fundamental assumptions and the primary requirements are called engineering construction documents. It acts as a blueprint to provide the engineers or architects a bird’s-eye view of the whole project. Generally, an engineering project comprises of large number of document sheets. These sheets maintain the constructional hierarchy of the projects. Accessing the information manually from a desired sheet becomes laborious and time consuming for an engineer or architect. Therefore, a hyperlinked navigation mechanism is essential to overcome the aforesaid problem. A special graphical representation named ‘callout’, which is usually circular in shape, contains the destination sheet names in such documents. In the automated project navigation process, a callout with the respective destination sheet name must be recognized properly. The destination sheet names are written in an abbreviated form in the callout. Here, we have proposed a novel software approach which can detect the circular callouts and also create hyperlinks to the destination sheets. This work has a significant impact in the AEC (Architectural, Engineering, Constructional) domain and we achieved very encouraging results by our method.