A Novel Knowledge-Based System for Interpreting Complex Engineering Drawings: Theory, Representation, and Implementation
- Resource Type
- Periodical
- Authors
- Lu, Tong; Tai, Chiew-Lan; Yang, Huafei; Cai, Shijie
- Source
- IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on. 31(8):1444-1457 Aug, 2009
- Subject
- Computing and Processing
Bioengineering
Knowledge based systems
Engineering drawings
Knowledge representation
Knowledge engineering
Shape
Robustness
Computer aided manufacturing
CADCAM
Design automation
Computer science
interpretation
engineering drawings
high-level analysis
graphics recognition.
- Language
- ISSN
- 0162-8828
2160-9292
1939-3539
We present a novel knowledge-based system to automatically convert real-life engineering drawings to content-oriented high-level descriptions. The proposed method essentially turns the complex interpretation process into two parts: knowledge representation and knowledge-based interpretation. We propose a new hierarchical descriptor-based knowledge representation method to organize the various types of engineering objects and their complex high-level relations. The descriptors are defined using an Extended Backus Naur Form (EBNF), facilitating modification and maintenance. When interpreting a set of related engineering drawings, the knowledge-based interpretation system first constructs an EBNF-tree from the knowledge representation file, then searches for potential engineering objects guided by a depth-first order of the nodes in the EBNF-tree. Experimental results and comparisons with other interpretation systems demonstrate that our knowledge-based system is accurate and robust for high-level interpretation of complex real-life engineering projects.