Semantic Classification of Railway Bridge Drawings Based on OCR and BP Neural Networks
Digital management of modern railway bridges, a substantial part of high-speed railway networks, is often hindered by manual interpretation of construction drawings for Building Information Modeling (BIM). While individual technologies like optical character recognition (OCR) and neural networks are well-established, their generic application often fails on complex engineering documents. To address this, a domain-adaptive automatic recognition and semantic interpretation framework is proposed for railway bridge construction drawings. The novelty of this work lies in a specialized hybrid data fusion strategy that intelligently merges vector CAD file parsing with morphology-denoised OCR, resolving spatial and semantic conflicts. Furthermore, a back-propagation (BP) neural network is explicitly adapted to classify the extracted text into specific engineering categories, overcoming the challenges of dense layouts and overlapping symbols. Finally, the framework achieves end-to-end integration by transforming these semantic entities directly into structured, IFC-compatible BIM parameters. Evaluated on 250 real-world drawings, the framework achieved an average F1-score of 91.0% in semantic classification and improved processing efficiency by 6.5 times compared to manual methods. Moreover, 93.8% of the extracted entities achieved strict BIM parameter correctness, defined as seamless mapping to Revit IFC attributes without manual intervention.
Authors
- Yalong Xie (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-6479-3467)
- Bao Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9335-5411)
- Shuoyang Zhao
- Ze Guo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-3569-189X)
- Xing Yang
- Wanqi Wang
- Ruichang Shi
Institutions
- Beijing Jiaotong University (CN)
- China Academy of Railway Sciences (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Applied Sciences
- Published
- 2026-04-24
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/app16094206
- Primary Topic
- Handwritten Text Recognition Techniques
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00