3-D CAD models are an important digital resource in the manufacturing industry. 3-D CAD model retrieval has become a key technology in product lifecycle management enabling the reuse of existing design data. In this paper, we propose a new method to retrieve 3-D CAD models based on 2-D pen-based sketch inputs. Sketching is a common and convenient method for communicating design intent during early stages of product design, e.g., conceptual design. However, converting sketched information into precise 3-D engineering models is cumbersome, and much of this effort can be avoided by reuse of existing data. To achieve this purpose, we present a user-adaptive sketch-based retrieval method in this paper. The contributions of this work are twofold. First, we propose a statistical measure for CAD model retrieval: the measure is based on sketch similarity and accounts for users’ drawing habits. Second, for 3-D CAD models in the database, we propose a sketch generation pipeline that represents each 3-D CAD model by a small yet sufficient set of sketches that are perceptually similar to human drawings. User studies and experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the design process are presented.

The huge number of points scanned from pipeline plants make the plant reconstruction very difficult. Traditional cylinder detection methods cannot be applied directly due to the high computational complexity. In this paper, we explore the structural characteristics of point cloud in pipeline plants and define a structure feature. Based on the structure feature, we propose a hierarchical structure detection and decomposition method that reduces the difficult pipeline-plant reconstruction problem in IR3 into a set of simple circle detection problems in IR2. Experiments with industrial applications are presented, which demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed structure detection method.

The skeleton of a 2D shape is an important geometric structure in pattern analysis and computer vision. In this paper we study the skeleton of a 2D shape in a two-manifold M, based on a geodesic metric. We present a formal definition of the skeleton S(\Omega) for a shape V in M and show several properties that make S(\Omega) distinct from its Euclidean counterpart in R^2. We further prove that for a shape sequence {\Omega_i} that converge to a shape V in M, the mapping \Omega\rightarrow S(\Omega_i) is lower semi-continuous. A direct application of this result is that we can use a set P of sample points to approximate the boundary of a 2D shape V in M, and the Voronoi diagram of P inside \Omega\subset M gives a good approximation to the skeleton S(\Omega). Examples of skeleton computation in topography and brain morphometry are illustrated.

The medial axis is an important shape representation that finds a wide range of applications in shape analysis. For large-scale shapes of high resolution, a progressive medial axis representation that starts with the lowest resolution and gradually adds more details is desired. In this paper, we propose a fast and robust geometric algorithm that computes progressive medial axes of a large-scale planar shape. The key ingredient of our method is a novel structural analysis of merging medial axes of two planar shapes along a shared boundary. Our method is robust by separating the analysis of topological structure from numerical computation. Our method is also fast and we show that the time complexity of merging two medial axes is O(n log nv), where n is the number of total boundary generators, nv is strictly smaller than n and behaves as a small constant in all our experiments. Experiments on large-scale polygonal data and comparison with state-of-the-art methods show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method.

We introduce an interactive technique for manipulating simple 3D shapes based on extracting them from a single photograph. Such extraction requires understanding of the components of the shape, their projections, and relations. These simple cognitive tasks for humans are particularly difficult for automatic algorithms. Thus, our approach combines the cognitive abilities of humans with the computational accuracy of the machine to solve this problem. Our technique provides the user the means to quickly create editable 3D parts¡ª human assistance implicitly segments a complex object into its components, and positions them in space. In our interface, three strokes are used to generate a 3D component that snaps to the shape¡¯s outline in the photograph, where each stroke defines one dimension of the component. The computer reshapes the component to fit the image of the object in the photograph as well as to satisfy various inferred geometric constraints imposed by its global 3D structure. We show that with this intelligent interactive modeling tool, the daunting task of object extraction is made simple. Once the 3D object has been extracted, it can be quickly edited and placed back into photos or 3D scenes, permitting object-driven photo editing tasks which are impossible to perform in image-space.

Delaunay meshes (DM) are a special type of triangle mesh where the local Delaunay condition holds everywhere. We present an efficient algorithm to convert an arbitrary manifold triangle mesh M into a Delaunay mesh. We show that the constructed DM has O(Kn) vertices, where n is the number of vertices in M and K is a model-dependent constant. We also develop a novel algorithm to simplify Delaunay meshes, allowing a smooth choice of detail levels. Our methods are conceptually simple, theoretically sound and easy to implement. The DM construction algorithm also scales well due to its O(nK logK) time complexity. Delaunay meshes have many favorable geometric and numerical properties. For example, a DM has exactly the same geometry as the input mesh, and it can be encoded by any mesh data structure. Moreover, the empty geodesic circumcircle property implies that the commonly used cotangent Laplace-Beltrami operator has non-negative weights. Therefore, the existing digital geometry processing algorithms can benefit the numerical stability of DM without changing any codes. We observe that DMs can improve the accuracy of the heat method for computing geodesic distances. Also, popular parameterization techniques, such as discrete harmonic mapping, produce more stable results on the DMs than on the input meshes.

We present a novel solution to automatic semantic modeling of indoor scenes from a sparse set of low-quality RGB-D images. Such data presents challenges due to noise, low resolution, occlusion and missing depth information. We exploit the knowledge in a scene database containing 100s of indoor scenes with over 10,000 manually segmented and labeled mesh models of objects. In seconds, we output a visually plausible 3D scene, adapting these models and their parts to fit the input scans. Contextual relationships learned from the database are used to constrain reconstruction, ensuring semantic compatibility between both object models and parts. Small objects and objects with incomplete depth information which are difficult to recover reliably are processed with a two-stage approach. Major objects are recognized first, providing a known scene structure. 2D contour-based model retrieval is then used to recover smaller objects. Evaluations using our own data and two public datasets show that our approach can model typical real-world indoor scenes efficiently and robustly.

3D scene modeling has long been a fundamental problem in computer graphics and computer vision. With the popularity of consumer-level RGB-D cameras, there is a growing interest in digitizing real-world indoor 3D scenes. However, modeling indoor 3D scenes remains a challenging problem because of the complex structure of interior objects and poor quality of RGB-D data acquired by consumer-level sensors. Various methods have been proposed to tackle these challenges. In this survey, we provide an overview of recent advances in indoor scene modeling techniques, as well as public datasets and code libraries which can facilitate experiments and evaluation.