A new approach for the skeletonization of engineering drawings is proposed. The underlying idea of the proposed approach is totally different from that of the traditional approach. A contour vectorization process is first applied to the contour image of an engineering drawing followed by a contour skeletonization process to obtain the skeleton of the engineering drawing. The resultant description of the drawing is stored in the form of vector instead of raster image. The experimental results show that the speed and storage demand of the proposed approach are much faster and smaller than those of the traditional thinning approach. Besides, the approach does not have the spurious effects bothering most of the thinning algorithms.
