Fun fact: the name The Sniffers comes from the early days of the company, when specially trained dogs were used to detect gas leaks using their powerful sense of smell. Today, that same mission lives on. Only now, it’s AI doing the sniffing.

THE HIDDEN CHALLENGE BEHIND EVERY INSPECTION

P&ID diagrams are the backbone of industrial inspections. They show how every pipe, valve and sensor connects in complex systems. But interpreting them isn’t simple. Each symbol carries meaning and overlooking just one can lead to flawed inspection plans or missed risks.

For Intero - The Sniffers, manually analyzing these diagrams was not only time-consuming, but also a bottleneck in their workflow. What they needed was a smarter solution. A tool that could read P&IDs directly from PDF, automatically recognize and classify the components, extract relevant metadata and drastically reduce the manual effort involved.

A CUSTOM BUILT PIPELINE

To streamline this time-consuming step in the inspection process, Sioux Technologies developed a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for Intero - The Sniffers: the P&ID Scraper. This AI-powered tool automatically reads and interprets technical diagrams, combining several smart technologies into a powerful processing pipeline:

1. Reading the P&ID PDF

The tool starts by ingesting P&ID diagrams from PDFs, cleaning and preparing them for analysis. It handles variations in layout, format and quality, ensuring reliable input every time.

2. Identifying and classifying the symbols

Next, using computer vision and custom-trained deep learning models, the Scraper detects and classifies all relevant symbols – from valves and pumps to instrumentation – even when elements look remarkably similar.

3. Extracting additional (meta) information from the diagram

Finally, the tool extracts valuable contextual data: tags, labels and connections between components. The result? Rich, structured information ready to use for inspections and reporting.