Purdue News Photos
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A "shape-search" method developed by engineers at Purdue University enables people to search a company's catalog of parts created with computer-aided design software. The method, which has been commercialized by a company in the Purdue Research Park, lets people sketch the general shape of the part they are looking for and retrieves parts that match the sketch. As this image illustrates, users also can pick an inventoried CAD part that resembles the part they are seeking, and the system retrieves matches. The search can be conducted over the Internet or internally at a company site. Shape-search engines could save time and millions of dollars annually by making it easier for companies to "reuse" previous designs, reducing redundancy and streamlining a company's supply chain.
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Three-dimensional shape searching is a problem of current interest in several different fields, especially in the mechanical engineering domain. There has been a large body of work in developing representations for 3-D shapes. However, there has been limited work done in developing domain dependent benchmark databases for 3-D shape searching. In this paper, we propose a benchmark database for evaluating shape based search methods relevant to the mechanical engineering domain. Twelve feature vector-based representations are compared using the benchmark database. The main contributions of this paper are development of an engineering shape benchmark and an understanding of the effectiveness of different shape representations for classes of engineering parts.
(Photos by: School of Mechanical Engineering/Purdue University)
The story accompanying these photographs can be seen by clicking this link to Ramani.CAD05
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David Umberger
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umberger@purdue.edu
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