[yonilevy]

Kinda related, I want an app that takes a picture of a hand drawn diagram and converts that to SVG (or whatever format I could later edit digitally). That would be a great way to bootstrap a large diagram, as it seems all diagram editors lose to pen & paper.

[jankovicsandras]

ImageTracer is a simple raster image tracer and vectorizer, 100% free, Public Domain.

Available in JavaScript (works both in the browser and with Node.js), "desktop" Java and "Android" Java:

https://github.com/jankovicsandras/imagetracerjs

https://github.com/jankovicsandras/imagetracerjava

https://github.com/jankovicsandras/imagetracerandroid

[systoll]

Not exactly what you described, but I'm a big fan of Grafio for iPad as a diagram tool, because 'sketching' is the primary input. You can't import something from paper, but if you've got an iPad around, you can draw on it like paper, and it'll give you the neater & better aligned counterparts of the things as you draw them.

Much better than pulling shapes out of a toolbox. Or typing.

[megalodon]

Something like the Live Trace tool in Illustrator but for simple shapes? Would be really interesting to try to build that.

[yonilevy]

Not sure what that is, but probably not -- it should be able to detect simple geometrical shapes (and label them), lines/arrows between shapes, and ofcourse text. Perhaps I'll try to build that :)

[yorwba]

If you want to look at research papers for inspiration, the term to look for seems to be "sketch recognition". E.g. this paper for UML diagrams: https://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Spring/2002/SS-02-08/SS...

[yonilevy]

link is broken but google cache works, thanks a lot!