Read Title Block from Technical Drawings Intelligently

It can be difficult for manufacturers or online manufacturing platforms when data is trapped in the Title Block of Technical Drawings and there’s no solution to access it in an automated way.

Whether handling incoming RFQs, estimating price or importing them to your EPR or PPS systems, Title Block contains essential information about Material and General Tolerances. On the other hand, if you want to build an easy searchable digital archive of your Engineering Drawings, the needless to say some information is critical to such system such as Designation, Drawing ID and Reference ID from the Title Blocks.

This task looks easy to solve with OCR, but in reality, each individual company uses their own Title Block templates for Engineering Drawings. This makes technologies like OCR impossible to achieve such task of understanding all Title Block information. The machine building industry demands a technical solution that is more robust and intelligent in processing Title Blocks.

Automated Solution for Reading Title Block 

With the aid of our advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, Werk24’s TechRead API is able to automatically and intelligently extract all essential information from Engineering Drawings regardless of your Title Block format:

• Designation

• Drawing ID

• Reference ID

• Material

• General Tolerances

• Revision Table

Harder Than You Thought

Though this task of extracting data from Title Block looks simple and straightforward, there are many practical challenges you have to solve:

Language: Drawings contain one or more foreign languages. Werk24 supports French, German, and English.

Missing Caption: A cell in the Title Block may be missing a caption, that is, the description of what the content is such as “Designation” or “Drawing ID”.  They are often missing because it is assumed the human reading it understands its content. Werk24 uses AI technology to deduce the meaning of the content in each cell. 

Caption and Value Apart: Captions may not be in the same cell with the content but instead be in a neighboring cell. This causes a problem, because just reading the cell is insufficient to ensure all the content is obtained.  The TechRead API can find all “Caption-Content” pairs in the Title Block to increase accuracy. As an example, “A4” can be both a paper size and a material. If Werk24 detects a material pair elsewhere in the Title Block, it knows this “A4” refers to the paper size. However, if “A2” is also found in a Paper Size pair, then it knows the “A4” is a “Material code.” 

Separated Title Blocks: The Title Block itself may be hard to find, because it may be separated into different parts over the entire Drawing—even in opposite corners. Werk24 will interpret the Drawing as a whole and retrieve all its relevant Title Block information, whatever the location or orientation. 

Applications for Customers 

Our TechRead API’s Title Block capabilities offer many applications that can effectively enhance your business:

• New business Applications—When data is extracted in seconds automatically, it becomes possible to offer nearly-instant production feasibility check, pricing, quoting and direct online ordering based on merely a Technical Drawing. Now you can serve your customers without a 3D model instead of rejecting them or going through a week-long process.

• Streamlined internal systems—Werk24 helps you automatically feed feasible RFQs into ERP and PPS pipeline with all necessary information imported. This ensures data are picked up at the entry point and being used in the streamlined way across future implementations.

• Digital archiving—As businesses seek to archive and digitize their internal systems, retrieving usable and actionable data from Drawings is more important than ever. Werk24 ensures such information is later searchable and easily accessed. 

Why This Matters 

The advantages in automated access to Title Block information are substantial. Automatically extracting the data means your employees are free from repetitive trivial task to focus on business-critical tasks. This improves your bottom-line performance and ensure the accuracy and efficiency throughout your processes. Furthermore, speedy responses increase the customer satisfaction, ensuring more customers can connect to you and access your production capability through faster and smoother experience. 

Together, we will assure actionable data is functional for all your business purposes without delay.  Contact us today to ensure your business needs from Technical Drawings are met and exceeded.