FROM ENGINEERING DRAWINGS TO 3D CAD MODELS - ARE WE READY NOW

Conversion of engineering drawings into CAD format has so far concentrated almost solely on low-level operations, such as vectorization, basic layer separation and very limited symbol recognition. The paper discusses the reasons for the lack of serious attempts at moving into higher levels and what can be done to improve this situation. On the basis of the authors' expertise in syntactic (dimension sets) and semantic (functionalities) analysis of mechanical engineering drawings, a scheme is proposed for achieving high-level conversion of technical documents of this type into 3D CAD models.