Partitioning Open Plan Areas in Floor Plans

We are developing an application to automatically generate an accessible graphic from a floor plan image. Floor plans generally contain large regions with functionally different sub-areas. A problem faced by visually impaired users in exploring such accessible floor plans is understanding the boundaries of these sub-areas. We present an effective method to partition such open plan areas. Initially, we conducted a formative user study to understand how people partition open plan areas. Based on the findings of the study, we identified a general set of guidelines for partitioning open plans. These guidelines were used to generate a set of candidate lines for sub-areas. An obstacle avoiding shortest-path Voronoi diagram was used to determine boundaries for each sub-area. Candidate lines such as wall extensions were automatically generated to replace the identified boundaries. We selected the best replacement for each boundary by scoring candidate lines using a set of criteria such as line length. Finally the proposed method was tested on a standard floor plan corpus using three novel measures.