RC-Net: Row and Column Network with Text Feature for Parsing Floor Plan Images

The popularity of online home design and floor plan customization has been steadily increasing. However, the manual conversion of floor plan images from books or paper materials into electronic resources can be a challenging task due to the vast amount of historical data available. By leveraging neural networks to identify and parse floor plans, the process of converting these images into electronic materials can be significantly streamlined. In this paper, we present a novel learning framework for automatically parsing floor plan images. Our key insight is that the room type text is very common and crucial in floor plan images as it identifies the important semantic information of the corresponding room. However, this clue is rarely considered in previous learning-based methods. In contrast, we propose the Row and Column network (RC-Net) for recognizing floor plan elements by integrating the text feature. Specifically, we add the text feature branch in the network to extract text features corresponding to the room type for the guidance of room type predictions. More importantly, we formulate the Row and Column constraint module (RC constraint module) to share and constrain features across the entire row and column of the feature maps to ensure that only one type is predicted in each room as much as possible, making the segmentation boundaries between different rooms more regular and cleaner. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets validate that our framework substantially outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the metrics of FWIoU, mACC and mIoU.