A templating approach to digitisation of instrumentation panel readouts

Instrumentation panel readouts are one of many types of paper documents which are still in regular use as part of the operation of nuclear power plants. In order to utilise the information held in these documents, they must be converted into a digital format. This is currently performed manually, but could be improved by automation. For some classes of documents, this problem can be solved easily by the direct application of existing techniques, but in order to begin generalising to many classes of documents without creating a bespoke solution for each, a new approach is required. In this work, we present a case study on digitising instrumentation panel readouts, and show how this template-based method might be generalised to additional classes of document. By taking this approach, a user can easily turn a single well-formed instance of a document into a template which can be matched on to other instances to perform or shortcut the segmentation process. This work shows how this class of document can be digitised from start to finish, and presents a step towards being able to digitise more complex document formats such as engineering drawings, while reducing data entry in the short term.