The team behind CVCAD
CVCAD is developed within conservation, architecture and engineering practices, in response to a recurring operational need: reducing the time spent manually tracing drawings that photographic documentation already contains.
Origin of the project
In architectural survey work, photographic documentation accumulates throughout the contract cycle — preliminary site visits, progress records, documentation of the works — and remains iconographic material. To become a technical drawing it must be traced, elevation by elevation, in a CAD environment.
Tracing requires specific expertise but produces no new technical content: the technician does not interpret the building, but transcribes an interpretation already formed while observing the photograph. Our starting question was whether that transcription can be automated without losing the technical judgement that governs it. The comparison of available approaches documents why the answer is not an auto-trace.
Team composition
From conservation and restoration practices
comes the criterion of usability: which discontinuities on a surface correspond to built elements, what level of detail an as-found drawing requires in order to be usable, and within what margins an approximated line remains acceptable.
From architecture and engineering practices
come the constraints on the output. A drawing is only useful if it fits an existing workflow: DXF that opens without warnings, entities as editable polylines, coordinates in real millimetres. These requirements emerge from daily use of the deliverables, not from the format specification.
From AI engineers
comes the implementation: vision model architecture, processing pipeline, vectorisation, server-side metric calibration.
Every implementation decision is verified by those who will use the output on site, and every site requirement is translated into a system constraint. CVCAD can be assessed on the drawings it produces.
Criteria applied to the product
Scale calibration rather than declaration
Scale is set by selecting two points of known length on the vector preview, with snapping to vertices, following the same procedure used to take a control measurement on site: on an element identifiable in the drawing. The full workflow is structured in three steps.
DXF output in AutoCAD 2013 format
Not the most recent release, but the one with the widest backward compatibility, readable from R2010 onwards. The other supported formats and software follow the same criterion.
Explicit statement of limits
The drawing produced by CVCAD is subject to verification and is not a certified metric document. Professional responsibility remains with the technician who signs it, and the service documentation must state this explicitly. By the same criterion, uploaded files remain in private storage and are deleted after five days.
Contact
Technical questions, enquiries regarding specific projects or bug reports: support@cvcad.app. We reply in Italian and English.
Try CVCAD on your next survey
Sign up and get 1 free conversion: upload a photo and download a DXF already in real millimetre scale.