Retrieving 3D CAD model by freehand sketches for design reuse

Reuse of existing designs can help companies save up a significant amount of time and money in large-scale product development. Searching out similar CAD models of products is a key to facilitating design reuse. This paper proposes a method for retrieving CAD models of mechanical parts by freehand sketches. Users can draw three 2D outline sketches and a skeleton sketch to express their query intent. The 2D outline sketches describe the geometrical information of models and the skeleton sketch contains the topological information. A relevance feedback mechanism is introduced to combine the two similarity degrees measured by 2D outlines or skeleton into a unified one. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.