Visio should trace a scanned image

[Joe]

I am a network technician for a university and we frequently scan-in
floorplans and save them as gifs, load them in visio and trace over the
floorplan with the line tool, door tool, etc to make a visio of the floorplan
that we can later use for different purposes. I think it would be great if
you could import an image into visio and it would use some type of edge
detection to find the lines that make up the floor plan and do the 'tracing'
for you to produce a visio. Since most floorplans are black and white I
don't think it would be too hard, but I'm not a programmer. I've looked
online and haven't been able to find anything that seems to do what I want.

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[Roger]

Hello Joe
Converting raster images into vector drawings is by no means easy. In
general it is much more difficult than optical character recognition because
the desired output is much less well defined.

What you need is a raster to vector converter. There are a number available
at a wide range of prices, e.g. Scan2CAD (www.softcover.com) saves to DXF
files which can be imported into Visio; VPHybridCAD
(www.softelec.com/?vphybridcad) has powerful editing facilities.

Even with a high resolution scan from a very high quality floorplan drawing,
the accuracy of a raster to vector conversion is unlikely to be sufficient
for most CAD puposes because of the small scale used in the original drawing.

It's been a few years since I last tried a raster to vector converter.
Therefore, the technology might have improved a little and obviously it's
suitability would depend upon your particular application and expectations.

I hope this helps.
Best regards
Roger Billsdon