Automatic recognition of mechanical engineering drawings

The authors investigated an automatic recognition system for mechanical engineering drawings. The bottom-up scheme, which recognizes each of the components and builds the structures among them, and the top-down scheme, which identifies the valid components and structures, were integrated by the application of a blackboard model. The major target to be reached was recognition of the drawings where some of the characters are connected to other elements. The approach to recognition of the drawings which are noisy and degraded and where some of the components are connected together is also discussed. Experimental results showed that the system works well with the drawings where, for instance, character strings and dimension lines are connected together