Drawing2CAD: Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for CAD Generation from Vector Drawings

TL;DR

Drawing2CAD introduces a sequence-to-sequence learning framework that converts 2D vector drawings into parametric CAD models, bridging the gap between traditional engineering workflows and modern generative modeling.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach that models CAD generation as sequence-to-sequence learning with specialized representations and architecture, and provides a new dataset for training and evaluation.

Findings

Effective conversion of vector drawings to CAD models demonstrated

Preserves geometric precision and design intent

Outperforms baseline methods in accuracy and flexibility

Abstract

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) generative modeling is driving significant innovations across industrial applications. Recent works have shown remarkable progress in creating solid models from various inputs such as point clouds, meshes, and text descriptions. However, these methods fundamentally diverge from traditional industrial workflows that begin with 2D engineering drawings. The automatic generation of parametric CAD models from these 2D vector drawings remains underexplored despite being a critical step in engineering design. To address this gap, our key insight is to reframe CAD generation as a sequence-to-sequence learning problem where vector drawing primitives directly inform the generation of parametric CAD operations, preserving geometric precision and design intent throughout the transformation process. We propose Drawing2CAD, a framework with three key technical components: a network-friendly vector primitive representation that preserves precise geometric information, a dual-decoder transformer architecture that decouples command type and parameter generation while maintaining precise correspondence, and a soft target distribution loss function accommodating inherent flexibility in CAD parameters. To train and evaluate Drawing2CAD, we create CAD-VGDrawing, a dataset of paired engineering drawings and parametric CAD models, and conduct thorough experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/lllssc/Drawing2CAD.