DiMASH: Towards an AI-based digitization tool for technical building system diagrams

When planning renovation and optimization measures for existing technical building systems, the initial stocktaking is a labor- and time-intensive task. With the DiMASH project, we aim to streamline this process by developing AI-based algorithms which scan images of technical building system diagrams and automatically transfer them into semantically enriched digital representations of the respective systems. We use advanced computer vision and image processing methods to scan the depicted components, find the connecting lines, and read out descriptive text elements. The distilled information is structured in a data model based on suitable Semantic Web ontologies. A demonstrator app bundles this process with downstream features for editing and extending the scanned contents. We develop and validate our approaches with a set of real technical building system diagrams from the building industry. For a final practical assessment of the overall procedure, we plan to apply the demonstrator app in two real construction projects.