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.

We consider the solution of the large-scale nonsymmetric algebraic Riccati equation XCX − XD − AX + B = 0, with M ≡ [D,−C;−B,A] ∈ R(n1+n2)×(n1+n2) being a nonsingular M-matrix. In addition, A and D are sparselike, with the products A−1u, A−⊤u, D−1v, and D−⊤v computable in O(n) complexity (with n = max{n1, n2}), for some vectors u and v, and B, C are low ranked. The structure-preserving doubling algorithms (SDA) by Guo, Lin, and Xu [Numer. Math., 103 (2006), pp. 392–412] is adapted, with the appropriate applications of the Sherman–Morrison– Woodbury formula and the sparse-plus-low-rank representations of various iterates. The resulting large-scale doubling algorithm has an O(n) computational complexity and memory requirement per iteration and converges essentially quadratically. A detailed error analysis, on the effects of truncation of iterates with an explicit forward error bound for the approximate solution from the SDA, and some numerical results will be presented.

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We explain how the classical notions of Fisher information of a random variable and Fisher information matrix of a random vector can be extended to a much broader setting. We also show that Stam’s inequality for Fisher information and Shannon entropy, as well as the more generalized versions proved earlier by the authors, are all special cases of more general sharp inequalities satisfied by random vectors. The extremal random vectors, which we call generalized Gaussians, contain Gaussians as a limiting case but are noteworthy because they are heavy- tailed.

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