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.

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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
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article

Semantic Classification of Railway Bridge Drawings Based on OCR and BP Neural Networks

Yalong Xie, Bao Liu, Shuoyang Zhao, Ze Guo et al.
Applied Sciences
Handwritten Text Recognition Techniques
article

Semantic Classification of Railway Bridge Drawings Based on OCR and BP Neural Networks

Yalong Xie, Bao Liu, Shuoyang Zhao, Ze Guo, Xing Yang, Wanqi Wang, Ruichang Shi
article en

Abstract

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.

Applied SciencesVol. 16(9)
Beijing Jiaotong University (CN), China Academy of Railway Sciences (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 6%
Handwritten Text Recognition Techniques
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