Case study
Computer Vision Speeds Building Plan Reviews for Agencies
How a US government agency used computer vision and a rules engine to automate building-plan compliance checks.
Manual plan review doesn't scale past headcount. Pairing computer vision with a rules engine against the master spec turns a subjective read into a consistent, auditable check every time.
Platform & Software Engineering Practice Lead, SquareShift
A U.S. government regulatory body that reviews building construction plans for compliance with municipal and safety codes.
It handles both residential and commercial projects, and before this engagement, reviewed every plan by hand.
- Automated verification — Building plans checked against master specs without manual review.
- Computer vision — Plan specs extracted directly from scanned drawings.
- One dashboard — Reviewers see a single summary and final report.
How SquareShift delivered it.
The challenge
A U.S. government regulatory body reviews building construction plans for compliance with municipal and safety codes, across both residential and commercial projects. Every plan went through a manual read against the code, one reviewer and one project at a time.
That manual process was the bottleneck: verification took as long as a person needed to read and cross-check each plan, with no consistent, auditable way to prove every plan had been checked the same way.
What we delivered
SquareShift built an application that scans submitted building plans and uses computer vision to extract the specs directly from the drawings — identifying exact locations and elements within a building from the image alone.
A rules engine then compares those extracted specs against the agency’s master specifications, and the system sends reviewers a notification summarizing every element that was checked, backed by a dashboard showing the final review report.
The payoff
Building plan reviews now run through a consistent, automated check instead of a fully manual read, with a dashboard giving reviewers one place to see the full picture.
Reviewers can still validate the details that matter, but the routine compliance check no longer depends on one person’s manual pass through every page.
Where this work sits