“…During its early years, the objective of reconstruction was to collect know-how from old designs kept in drafting rooms. However, the advance in computing technology, such as the introduction of solid modelling at the end of the 1980s, has broadened the objective further to not only reconstruct models but also integrate an upstream design with analysis and downstream production to increase productivity, and has allowed many formats, e.g., image files (Bin 1986, Kuo 1998, You and Yang 1998, Shum et al 2001, DXF files (Wang and Latif 2003, Ç içek and Gü lesin 2004, Dimri and Gurumoorthy 2005, Lee and Han 2005 and IGES files (Liu et al 2001, Tam andAtkinson 2003) to input a 2D drawing into the reconstruction process.…”