This paper explores a novel application of document generation: the automatic creation of residential electrical plans from architectural data. Electrical plan documents, crucial to all residential construction and renovation projects, are currently generated manually by electrical designers who must adhere to the local electrical code and follow industry best practices. The designers decide the type and location of all household electrical devices and outlets based on the architectural floor plans. This is a tedious, highly repetitive, and time-consuming task. We propose a procedural approach to automate the generation of residential electrical plans via a stack-based finite state machine model that mimics the electrical designer's thought process. The system receives 2D architectural data (e.g. wall location) as input and yields a customized electrical plan as output. Experimental results on a variety of architectural layouts of bathrooms, bedrooms, and kitchens are very promising and demonstrate the approach's functionality and usefulness. This paper paves the way for new algorithmic tools facilitating the design cycle of building projects.

This paper provides a comprehensive comparative study of traditional, hybrid, and deep learning (DL) methods for detecting marine species in echograms. Acoustic backscatter data obtained from multi-frequency echosounders is visualized as echograms and typically interpreted by marine biologists via manual or semi-automatic methods, which are time-consuming. Challenges related to automatic echogram interpretation are the variable size and acoustic properties of the biological targets (marine life), along with significant inter-class similarities. Our study explores and compares three types of approaches that cover the entire range of machine learning methods. Based on our experimental results, we conclude that an end-to-end DL-based framework, that can be readily scaled to accommodate new species, is overall preferable to other learning approaches for echogram interpretation, even when only a limited number of annotated training samples is available.

Applying a fast over-segmentation algorithm to image and working on a region-based graph (instead of the pixel-based graph) is an efficient approach to reduce the computational complexity of graph-based image segmentation methods. Nevertheless, some undesirable effects may arise if the conventional cost functions, such as Ncut, AverageCut, and MinCut, are employed for partitioning the region-based graph. This is because these cost functions are generally tailored to pixel-based graphs. In order to resolve this problem, we first introduce a new class of cost functions (containing Ncut and AverageCut) for graph partitioning whose corresponding suboptimal solution can be efficiently computed by solving a generalized eigenvalue problem. Then, among these cost functions, we propose one that considers the size of regions in the partitioning procedure. By simulation, the performance of the proposed cost function is quantitatively compared with that of the Ncut and AverageCut.