This disclosure relates to digitization of industrial inspection sheets. Digital scanning of paper based inspection sheets is a common process in factory settings. The paper based scans have data pertaining to millions of faults detected over several decades of inspection. The technical challenge ranges from image preprocessing and layout analysis to word and graphic item recognition. This disclosure provides a visual pipeline that works in the presence of both static and dynamic background in the scans, variability in machine template diagrams, unstructured shape of graphical objects to be identified and variability in the strokes of handwritten text. The pipeline incorporates a capsule and spatial transformer network based classifier for accurate text reading and a customized Connectionist Text Proposal Network (CTPN) for text detection in addition to hybrid techniques for arrow detection and dialogue cloud removal.