Line Width Recovery after Vectorization of Engineering Drawings

Vectorization is the conversion process of a raster image representation into a vector representation. The contemporary commercial vectorization software applications do not provide sufficiently high quality outputs for such images as do mechanical engineering drawings. Line width preservation is one of the problems. There are applications which need to know the line width after vectorization because this line attribute carries the important semantic information for the next 3D model generation. This article describes the algorithm that is able to recover line width of individual lines in the vectorized engineering drawings. Two approaches are proposed, one examines the line width at three points, whereas the second uses a variable number of points depending on the line length. The algorithm is tested on real mechanical engineering drawings.