DRAWING RECOGNIZING DEVICE

PURPOSE:To automatically and quickly decide and extract a main road, a side road, a footpath from a map including a road similar pattern by analyzing inputted map data, extracting a town district including annexed footpaths and executing pair vector extraction by a hierarchical vector extracting means based upon the extracted information. CONSTITUTION:Map data are read in by a map data inputting means 1 and analyzed by a town district extracting means 2 to extract a town district including annexed footpaths. Then pair vectors constituting a road non-intersection part are hierarchically extracted by a hierarchical pair vector extracting means 3 based upon the analyzed town district information. Since the pair vectors are hierarchically extracted, the main road can be extracted from the map including the road similar pattern so as to be distinguished from side road and footpaths.