The CAD System for 3-D Modeling by Generation and Understanding of Drawings

Abstract

In this note, we introduce and survey our CAD project being carried on in our laboratory. Main stress is placed on clarifying the difference between the drawing understanding and the drawing recognition. The former, in which we feel major interest, is intrinsically a difficult problem because it inherently contains combinatorial search to require more than polynomial time. Actually, understanding drawings is regarded as a process to recover the information lost in projecting 3-D objects to 2-D drawings. But, solid modeling by automatic understanding of the given drawings is one of the promising approach, which is described precisely in the text. Reviewing the studies performed so far, we summarize the future direction of the project and inevitable open problems left.