Automatic scanning and interpretation of engineering drawings

Successful future product development will be closely connected to an effective way of using CAD-facilities integrated in a CIM-environment. The integration aspect cannot be seen without concentrating on information processing and information acquisition problems. Todays CAD-systems do not provide possibilities for automatic capture of engineering drawing information. The increasing amount of existing engineering drawings - which in large part contain companies' know how - cannot be modified or accessed by CAD-systems, but may not be neglected in design processes using CAD-systems: Therefore, a real demand for convenient conversion methodes for engineering drawings can be stated. In this paper actual and new possibilities for the automated conversion of engineering drawings into CAD-models are discussed. After a global description of the conversion process, problems as well as existing and future solutions of processing substeps are explained in detail. The structure in principal and c omponents of conversion systems are described. The paper closes with an outlook on future trends and improvements using special hardware, parallel processing features and knowledge based methodes.