Abstract
Accurate and efficient vectorization is the foundation of analyzing and understanding engineering drawings. In this paper, an efficient skeletonizationless global algorithm for vectorizing line drawings is presented. It first extracts a seed segment of a graphic entity from a raster image to obtain its direction and width, and then tracks the pixels under the guidance of the direction so that the tracking can track through junctions and is not affected by noise and degradation of image quality. Thus, an entity will be vectorized in one step without post processing. The relations among lines are also used to realize the continuous vectorization of a line net. The speed and quality of vectorization are greatly improved with this algorithm. The performance evaluation is carried out both by theoretical analysis and by experiments. Comparisons with other vectorization algorithms are also made.