Many researches on feature recognition have been performed up to now, but the general solution for recognizing arbitrary features has not been developed. The most popular research area in feature recognition is automatic extraction of 2.5 dimensional features, because they are frequently used in manufacturing field. In this paper, a faster and more convenient 2.5 dimensional feature recognition algorithm is proposed using a new strategy which is quite different from the existing ones. The proposed algorithm takes process planning into consideration. The algorithm is implemented in C++. By applying the algorithm to practical complicate examples, we verify that the algorithm is working very well.