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

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.