A Novel Approach to Rapidly Generate Document from Hand Drawn Flowcharts

摘要

Flowcharts have a variety of applications in this era. Many business planners, software developers, management, and process engineers are comfortable using pen and paper or whiteboards to draw flowcharts. To bring their hand-drawn flowcharts to the digital world, this paper proposed a methodology to generate a flowchart in a computer file format which can then be embedded in word file, draw.io, or can generate an image. The transformation is done by extracting the basic shapes of a flowchart with the help of the Otsu thresholding algorithm, various types of morphological operations such as erosion, dilation, and opening, polygon approximation using the Ramer-Douglas-Peucker algorithm. At last, a handwriting recognition model is used for texts inside the blocks of a flowchart. Because the proposed method supports editable formats of the transformed flowchart, the flowchart can be finely tuned if the system output is not fully satisfying.