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.

We present an evolution method for designing the styling curves of garments. The procedure of evolution is driven by aesthetics-inspired scores to evaluate the quality of styling designs, where the aesthetic considerations are represented in the form of streamlines on human bodies. A dual representation is introduced in our platform to process the styling curves of designs, based on which robust methods for realizing the operations of evolution are developed. Starting from a given set of styling designs on human bodies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of set evolution inspired by aesthetic factors. The evolution is adaptive to the change of aesthetic inspirations. By this adaptation, our platform can automatically generate new designs fulfilling the demands of variations in different human bodies and poses.

In this paper, we investigate how to topologically and geometrically characterize the intersection relations between a movable convex polygon and a set  of possibly overlapping polygons fixed in the plane. More specifically, a subset   is called an intersection relation if there exists a placement of that intersects, and only intersects, . The objective of this paper is to design an efficient algorithm that finds a finite and discrete representation of all of the intersection relations between and . Past related research only focuses on the complexity of the free space of the configuration space between and  and how to move or place an object in this free space. However, there are many applications that require the knowledge of not only the free space, but also the intersection relations. Examples are presented to demonstrate the rich applications of the formulated problem on intersection relations.

In this paper, we consider the problem of approximating the longest path in a grid graph that possesses a square-free 2-factor. By (1) analyzing several characteristics of four types of cross cells and (2) presenting three cycle-merging operations and one extension operation, we propose an algorithm that finds in an n-vertex grid graph G, a long path of length at least 5/6 n + 2. Our approximation algorithm runs in quadratic time. In addition to its theoretical value, our work has also an interesting application in image-guided maze generation.