Traditional planning processes are significantly slowed by decades of planning information trapped in various formats. This includes paper maps, PDFs, handwritten notes, and blurry scanned documents. Planners currently take 1-2 hours to manually process each document. This prevents councils from making faster planning decisions.
The solution
Extract is an AI tool that combines multiple artificial intelligence technologies to digitise historical planning documents automatically. The system uses advanced language models including Google DeepMind's Gemini to read and extract text information, while computer vision technology including Meta's Segment Anything Model analyses images and maps. The tool works through a two-stage process: first extracting key details like dates, locations, and planning decisions from text, then using intelligent image analysis to trace property boundaries and create accurate digital maps.
The results
Extract has demonstrated significant performance improvements for planning document processing in early testing:
100% text extraction accuracy for all expected text fields from planning documents
94% accuracy in correct identification of dates and key information
Extract
Digitising historical planning documents
The challenge
Traditional planning processes are significantly slowed by decades of planning information trapped in various formats. This includes paper maps, PDFs, handwritten notes, and blurry scanned documents. Planners currently take 1-2 hours to manually process each document. This prevents councils from making faster planning decisions.
The solution
Extract is an AI tool that combines multiple artificial intelligence technologies to digitise historical planning documents automatically. The system uses advanced language models including Google DeepMind's Gemini to read and extract text information, while computer vision technology including Meta's Segment Anything Model analyses images and maps. The tool works through a two-stage process: first extracting key details like dates, locations, and planning decisions from text, then using intelligent image analysis to trace property boundaries and create accurate digital maps.
The results
Extract has demonstrated significant performance improvements for planning document processing in early testing:
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