A general strategy for the interpretation of twodimensional views of manufactured components is presented. The model database contains as primitives parameterised two-dimensional shape descriptions including feature type, position, and orientation where appropriate. Depending on the extent of each feature either a point or a point vector is associated with each constituent feature within the model or scene. Attributed geometric pairwise relations are formed between relevant primitives. The complexity of the search space of possible scene-model feature correspondences is limited in two ways. Firstly, the pre-formed pairwise relations are used to indicate the probable occurrence of both specific components and specific features. Secondly, a measure of saliency is employed which directs the search to those features which most precisely determine particular components. This is an extension and generalisation of previous work on the matching of two-dimensional descriptions and complements work on low and intermediate level processing of the scene data, based on the use of the generalised Hough transformation.