Vision knowledge vectorization: converting raster images into vector form

The traditional erosion based vectorization methods create flawed vector representations, which must then be corrected by hand. Some of these flaws are due to artifacts injected by the thinning process, while others are intrinsic to the process-perfect vectorization is not, in general, possible. The approach described here is based on looking at the complete search space, reduced by using knowledge about the image domain-that of engineering diagrams. The search space is reduced far enough that very good line and curve extractions can be performed. The results are compared against traditional vectorization in terms of the time needed by a human to repair the resulting line drawings