FME World Tour UK – 6th May: Automating the Digitisation of Static Utility Plans (Stantec)

FME World Tour UK – 6th May: It’s Crowded Down There – Automating the Digitisation of Static Utility Plans (Stantec)

FME’s raster interpretation ability and integration with open source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) allows for the automation of the digitisation of utility plans from a range of providers. In a civil engineering setting, if a site is to be scheduled for excavation, it is imperative to know what other assets are present in the area of interest, both from a commercial and health and safety viewpoint.

This is usually achieved by a request of plans from each utility provider, and a manual trace of each plan to a central digital location to understand the full presence of assets on site. A suite of FME workspaces were developed to automate the geolocating, scaling, and digitisation of the plans provided by a range of utility providers, achieved by incorporating OCR to interpret non-digital text and filtering on colour bands of features.