Transformation of hardcopy ship drawings to electronic
ones is usually accomplished through scanning and rasterto-
vector conversions. Such conversions are, however,
limited to produce low-degree vector entities, such as line
segments, poly-lines and circular arcs. As a consequence,
free-form curves, appearing in the original hardcopy, are
usually disintegrated to a significant number of overlapping
line and/or arc segments. The algorithm presented in
this paper, consists of a scan-line processing of line segments
that are grouped (clustered) with the aid of a moving
scan-line and an appropriately defined distance to previously
grouped entities. The performance of the algorithm is
illustrated for the body-plan of a bulk carrier.