Abstract
At the conceptual product design stage, designers prefer sketching initial design ideas on paper before using more sophisticated 3D CAD systems for their creativity and flexible design changes. At the later detailed design stages, however, precise 3D CAD modeling is a better choice for design analyses and downstream manufacturing applications. For an integrated digital product development, the 2D drawings need to be converted to 3D CAD models manually through some laborious and time-consuming processes. For decades, many researchers have contributed to the studies on reconstructing 3D geometric models from 2D sketches, but few describe constructing parametric feature-based CAD models that are currently widely used in the detailed design stages. In this paper, a procedure for constructing a feature-based 3D CAD model directly from a single-view 2D drawing is presented. The input sketch is assumed to be an exact orthogonal projection of a 3D model viewed at a general orientation. The model geometry is limited such that it can be constructed by a Boolean combination of extrusions of polygonal profiles.