The design of an efficient, low-cost system for automatically converting a hardcopy technical drawing into a highly compressed electronic representation is the motivation for this work. An improved method for extracting line and region information from a typical engineering drawing is presented. An efficient encoding method has also been proposed that takes advantage of the preprocessing done by the region and line extraction steps. Finally, a technique for creating a highly compressed mathematical representation (based on spline approximations) for the drawing is presented. / M.S.