Automatic recognition of tables in construction tender documents

The construction industry can gain much benefit from automation, especially in automatic document generation and recognition. In this paper, an automatic system for recognizing tables in construction tender documents is introduced. Tender documents contain a special kind of forms. The object-oriented attributed relationship graph (OO-ARG) is introduced to be the representation scheme for structuring the information contained in forms. The OO-ARG representation scheme is the core of the computer system for recognizing and interpreting tender documents. The system consists of two main modules: table modeler and table reader. The table modeler assists users to construct form models, and the table reader recognizes the input tables from the model database and re-generates electronic tables. Experimental results indicate that the system is efficient and applicable in recognizing construction tender documents. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V All rights reserved.