Title: Shape-based search of mechanical CAD models for product data management

Authors: Jiale Wang, Bo Jiang, Yuanjun He

Addresses: College of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, 310018, PR China. ' College of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, 310018, PR China. ' Department of Computer Science and Technology, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, 200240, PR China

Abstract: Product Data Management (PDM) systems can help companies save a significant amount of time and money in large-scale product development. Searching similar CAD models of products is a key to facilitate the management of product data. This paper discusses 3D model searching techniques and PDM in the application domain of mechanical CAD. For mechanical CAD models, both geometrical information and topological information are important for similarity assessment. We proposed two shape signatures to describe the geometry and the topology of a mechanical CAD model, respectively. A Relevance Feedback (RF) mechanism is introduced to combine the two dissimilarity distances measured by the two signatures. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method.

Keywords: CAD models; 3D modelling; information retrieval; PDM; product data management; mechanical CAD; shape-based search; CIBR; content-based image retrieval; model skeleton; skeleton graph; precision recall; shape signatures; relevance feedback.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2010.032201

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2010 Vol.37 No.2, pp.125 - 131

Published online: 16 Mar 2010 *

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