Search & Retrieval in CAD Databases
A User-centric State-of-the-Art Overview
Christoph Schinko
1,2
, Thomas Vosgien
3
, Thorsten Prante
3
, Tobias Schreck
2
and Torsten Ullrich
1,2
1
Fraunhofer Austria Research GmbH, Visual Computing @ Graz, Graz, Austria
2
Institute of Computer Graphics and Knowledge Visualization, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria
3
V-Research GmbH, Dornbirn, Austria
Keywords:
Computer-Aided Design, Information Retrieval, Library Services, CAD Search.
Abstract:
This article presents a state-of-the-art overview on shape, information and design retrieval systems in the
context of CAD engineering. In contrast to existing surveys, we classify the different approaches from a
CAD application user point of view. As a consequence, we focus on features of surveyed techniques such as:
supported shape data types, handling of geometric invariances, support of metadata, supported query types,
quality of retrieval results, and the availability of implementations.
1 MOTIVATION
The popularity of Computer-Aided Design (CAD)
and Product-Lifecycle-Management (PLM) systems
is based on a large amount of product information be-
ing generated and stored in engineering databases in
practice. This information is a source for new ways to
analyse and reuse existing designs. The reuse of de-
sign information is one of the important approaches to
increase design quality and productivity: An existing
design provides a basis for improvements incorporat-
ing the assemblies or components whose quality and
correctness have been proven in the past (Hoffmann
et al., 2014).
In engineering, it is conservatively estimated that
Figure 1: The top row shows a gimble ring, a lock nut, a
flange and a washer (from left to right), which have a sim-
ilar shape but a different classification according to their
function. The bottom row shows several washers (spring
lock washer, regular washer, hexagonal washer, knife-edge
washer; from left to right) with same name but different
shapes. – Image Source: (Jayanti et al., 2006) –
more than 75% of design activity comprises reuse of
previous design and manufacturing knowledge to ad-
dress a new design problem. Design reuse is achieved
by adaptation; i.e., the existing product is adapted to
a given requirement specification. In order to make
a design reusable, the key requirement is an informa-
tion retrieval system. Although PDM systems have
greatly improved productivity in the design and man-
ufacture of new products, one of the disadvantages
with such systems is the possible difficulty of reusing
the product information stored by the system. Engi-
neers spend about 60% of their time searching for the
right information (Li et al., 2004).
In contrast to retrieval systems for multimedia
databases, 3D shape repositories or general pur-
poses, the engineering context reveals several chal-
lenges (Jayanti et al., 2006):
1. Engineering shapes are characterized by features
such as holes, tunnels, cavities, etc. The relative
position of these features are more important for a
part’s functionality than its overall shape.
2. The classification of parts in the engineering con-
text has a low level of abstraction; e.g. a category
“airplanes” is not very reasonable in the context
of CAD, as an airplane would be considered as an
assembly of many much smaller objects.
3. In the CAD context, parts are often classified ac-
cording to their functionality and not according to
their geometric shape (cf. Figure 1).
306
Schinko C., Vosgien T., Prante T., Schreck T. and Ullrich T.
Search Retrieval in CAD Databases - A User-centr ic State-of-the-Art Overview.
DOI: 10.5220/0006268103060313
In Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2017), pages 306-313
ISBN: 978-989-758-224-0
Copyright
c
2017 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
2 RELATED WORK
2.1 Technical State of the Art
3D object retrieval is an important topic in product
lifecycle management. The various approaches to
tackle this problem have their roots in different re-
search domains: geometry processing, computer vi-
sion, pattern matching, knowledge management, etc.
Since almost two decades, many methods for 3D
shape description and retrieval have been researched.
Consequently, there is a need for surveys that system-
atize this research space. Within the last few years,
many state-of-the-art overviews have been published
and most of them are based on a taxonomy of the tech-
nique used. Table 1 lists important surveys in chrono-
logical order including bibliographic metrics.
Table 1: For each survey (in chronological order) this ta-
ble lists its number of pages, the number of included refer-
ences and the number of articles citing the survey. The ci-
tation numbers are based on the “Web of Science” database
by Thomson Reuters and on the “Microsoft Academia”
database (as of November 2016).
number
of pages
included
references
Web of
Science
Microsoft
Academia
(Loncaric, 1998) 19 223 1176
(Li et al., 2004) 9 79 6
(Zhang and Lu, 2004) 19 101 664 1866
(Bustos et al., 2005) 51 79 178 392
(Iyer et al., 2005) 22 154 201 556
(Bustos et al., 2006) 16 41 10 92
(Babic et al., 2008) 17 70 68 160
(Qin et al., 2008) 8 63 0 86
(Tangelder and Veltkamp, 2008) 31 136 265 1638
(Jayanti et al., 2009) 9 35 8 11
(Savelonas et al., 2015) 26 79 0 9
2.2 Benchmarks
Information retrieval in the context of Computer-
Aided Design and Product-Lifecycle-Management
should reflect a part’s functionality and not only its
geometric shape. General purpose shape benchmarks,
such as the Princeton Shape Benchmark (Shilane
et al., 2004), are only suited to a limited extent, as
they contain generic shapes.
The International Shape Retrieval Contest
(SHREC, http://www.shrec.net/) is a comprehensive
forum in which benchmarks and novel retrieval
challenges are defined, with the goal to compare
retrieval algorithms. To date, the benchmark has ad-
dressed many different retrieval problems, including
global and local similarity, non-rigid similarity, or
multimodal retrieval. However, CAD retrieval to date
was not a core topic in SHREC.
A set of CAD-specific benchmarks have been pub-
lished by BESPALOV et al. in “Benchmarking CAD
Search Techniques”(Bespalov et al., 2005). A com-
prehensive engineering shape benchmark for CAD
models has been developed by JAYANTI et al. (Jayanti
et al., 2006). The benchmark is publicly available at:
engineering.purdue.edu
3 CAD MODEL RETRIEVAL
3.1 Information Retrieval
Information retrieval algorithms need to be evaluated
for the quality of provided retrieval results. To this
end, many measures are avialable (Baeza-Yates and
Ribeiro-Neto, 2008). Basic important measures to
rate a retrieval result include numbers of relevant and
retrieved documents (see Table 2).
A more expressive evaluation can be performed by us-
ing precision and recall. These measures are defined
in terms of a set of retrieved documents and a set of
relevant documents. Precision p is the fraction of true
positive (tp) and the number of true positives plus the
number of false positives ( f p), whereas recall r is the
fraction of true positives and the number of true posi-
tives plus the number of false negatives ( fn):
p =
tp
tp+ fp
, r =
tp
tp+ fn
The two measurements are typically used to create
graphs the precision/recall-plots. Since precision
can be seen as a measure of quality, and recall as a
measure of quantity, a curve at the top of the plot is
what systems are aiming at in information retrieval.
To evaluate measures likes precision and recall, ex-
ample queries and ground truth information needs to
be defined in advance, e.g., by means of benchmarks
as mentioned in Section 2.2.
Table 2: Relevant and retrieved documents can give an in-
sight about the performance of an information retrieval sys-
tem.
relevant not relevant
retrieved true false
positives tp positives fp
not retrieved false true
negatives fn negatives tn
Search Retrieval in CAD Databases - A User-centric State-of-the-Art Overview
307
3.2 The Meaning of Shape
In the beginning of the 20. century MAX
WERTHEIMER began the formal founding of
Gestalt psychology (“Gestalt” is the German trans-
lation of “shape”, “form”) (King and Wertheimer,
2005), which attempts to understand the laws behind
the ability to acquire and maintain meaningful per-
ceptions. The central principle of gestalt psychology
maintains that when the human mind forms a percept,
the whole has a reality of its own, independent of
the parts.Conversely, IRVING BIEDERMAN explains
object recognition by a bottom-up process (Bieder-
man, 1987). According to his theory, we are able to
recognize objects by separating them into the object’s
main component parts–basic 3-dimensional shapes
such as cylinders, cones, etc. These basic shapes
form a simple “alphabet” that can be combined to
complex objects.
These principles have influenced many computer
graphics and computer vision techniques (Attene
et al., 2006). In “the meaning of shape and some
techniques to extract it” (Havemann et al., 2012) high-
light some of the fundamental but maybe less obvious
limitations of current methods for representing and
processing 3D shape. They introduce semantic en-
richment as central concept relating the subjective na-
ture of interpretation to the objective of classification.
This semantic information, which describes an object
on a high, abstract level, is needed in order to provide
digital library services such as indexing, markup and
retrieval (Ullrich and Fellner, 2011). A digital library
provides services based on metadata. In the simplest
case, metadata is of the Dublin Core type (Dublin
Core Metadata Initiative, 1995) (title, creator/author,
time of creation, etc). This is insufficient for large
databases with a huge number of 3D objects, because
of their versatility and rich structure.
As a consequence, automatic techniques for se-
mantic enrichment of CAD data is a vital research
topic. However, for many methods to calculate shape
signatures their relation to human perceptions of geo-
metric similarity is unknown (Clark et al., 2006).
3.3 Apples and Oranges
The problem of ill-defined properties such as “geo-
metric similarity” can be illustrated even with a sim-
ple geometric shape: a circular sector. A feature vec-
tor to (completely) describe a circular sector may con-
sist of the disk radius r and the central angle α; for
example:
c
A
= (5.0cm, 30
), c
B
= (5.5cm, 30
), c
C
= (5.0cm, 32
)
In order to measure “similarity” a metric is used
in many cases to define the distance between a
pair of feature vectors returning a non-negative
real number. A metric for two circular sectors
c
1
= (r
1
, α
1
) and c
2
= (r
2
, α
2
) is, for example,
d(c
1
, c
2
) =
p
(r
1
r
2
)
2
+ (α
1
α
2
)
2
. Each metric is
faced with the problem to compare elements with
each other which have no natural order. In our exam-
ple, switching the specification of the angles α from
degrees [0
, 360
] to radians [0, 2π] changes the order
of elements significantly:
degrees : d(c
A
, c
B
) = 0.500 < 2.000 = d(c
A
, c
C
)
radians : d(c
A
, c
B
) = 0.500 > 0.035 d(c
A
, c
C
)
The effects of different distances using different met-
rics is illustrated in Figure 2. An overview on distance
and similarity measures can be found in the survey by
SUNG HYUK CHA (Cha, 2007).
r
α r
α α
Figure 2: The metric used to measure the distance between
feature vectors defines the “similarity” of shapes. Different
metrics (illustrated by different coordinate systems; left
right) result in different distances and different similarities.
4 CLASSIFICATION
This state-of-the-art overview on shape and infor-
mation retrieval systems classifies the different ap-
proaches to design retrieval from a CAD application
user’s point of view
1
. The classification consists of
four categories inspecting different aspects of a digi-
tal library application.
4.1 Data and Metadata Representation
The first category analyses the design retrieval ap-
proaches according to supported input data. Assum-
ing a user with an already existing CAD database, the
supported features within input data are an important
selection criterion. This criterion does not address
1
The classification results are listed in the Tables 3
and 4. Despite every precaution these tables may contain
errors. If any errors are found, we ask your forgiveness, and
request you send us a short note pointing them out.
GRAPP 2017 - International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications
308
file formats but the geometric entities (point clouds,
polygonal meshes, NURBS, etc.) and the non geo-
metric entities (annotations, material properties, etc.)
which can be handled natively without conversion.
Geometric Input. Which geometric shape types and
model representations (point clouds, polygonal
data, analytical surfaces (NURBS, etc.), volumet-
ric data, constructive solid geometry (CSG), gen-
erative data) are supported natively without con-
version?
Manifoldness & Noise. Is the approach able to han-
dle inconsistencies, namely non-manifold geo-
metric input, and/or noisy input?
Level-of-Detail. If the database contains CAD mod-
els in different resolutions, does the inspected ap-
proach identify these “similar” models?
Invariants. Each approach uses a metric to identify
“similar” elements. Are a model and the same
model with an applied non-rigid/affine/isometric
transformation similar according to the used met-
ric? In other words, is the used metric invariant to-
wards non-rigid/affine/isometric transformations?
Metadata. Input data may contain metadata (mate-
rial properties, semantic annotations, copyright
information, etc.). Which kinds of metadata are
supported to be queried?
4.2 Queries and Results
Query Method. Which types of queries are sup-
ported (by example, by an image, by a taxonomy,
by a sketch, etc.)?
Subsets. Is it possible to query for a subpart only? In
other words, does the retrieval algorithm support
subpart matching?
Goodness. Are the queries and the corresponding re-
sults evaluated and benchmarked? And are the
benchmark results available?
4.3 Technology Readiness Level
Availability. Even though a retrieval algorithm may
be a significant scientific contribution, without
an available implementation its benefit from a
CAD application user’s point of view is limited.
What is the availability level of the presented ap-
proach (only article published, reference imple-
mentation available, library commercially/open-
source available, software released)?
Integration. If the implementation is available (com-
mercially or non-commercially), how can it be in-
tegrated into an existing CAD environment?
4.4 Technology
Method. A primary search method uses the (geo-
metric and non-geometric) content. A secondary
search method relies on a primary search method
and uses additional sources not contained in the in
the (geometric and non-geometric) content – such
as relevance-based user input. Is the analyzed ap-
proach a primary search method or a secondary
search method?
Performance. Are the results of computational
benchmarks considering speed and memory re-
quirements available?
5 CONCLUSIONS
This article presents a state-of-the-art overview on
shape, information and design retrieval systems in the
context of CAD engineering. In contrast to existing
surveys, we classify the different approaches from a
CAD application user point of view.
5.1 Open Problems
The classification scheme in Section 4 has been de-
signed before the classification took place. The
scheme is strongly influenced by interviews with in-
dustrial partners. Having classified the most im-
portant methods, some options of the classification
scheme remain unused. Especially the availability of
implementations is limited. As a consequence, the
comparison of different approaches with each other is
complicated.
5.2 Benefit
The presentation of an overview on state-of-the-art
techniques for CAD retrieval methods is beneficial for
CAD users. In contrast to existing surveys, we focus
on critiria which are important from a CAD applica-
tion user point of view: supported shape data types,
handling of geometric invariances, support of meta-
data, supported query types, quality of retrieval re-
sults, and the availability of implementations.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support
of the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, the
Forschungsf
¨
orderungsgesellschaft (FFG) for the re-
search project AEDA (K-Projekt Advanced Engi-
neering Design Automation”).
Search Retrieval in CAD Databases - A User-centric State-of-the-Art Overview
309
Table 3: This tabular overview lists the analyzed CAD retrieval approaches from a CAD application user’s point of view. All
approaches are ordered alphabetically according to the lastname of the first author. This table is continued on the next page
(cf. Table 4).
Geometric Input
Non-Manifoldness
& Noise
Level of Detail
Invariants
Metadata
Query Method
Subpart Matching
Goodness
Availability
Integration
Method
Performance
(Abouel Nasr and Kamrani, 2006) Á Á À 3 À
(Akg
¨
ul et al., 2009) Á 3 3 Á À 3 À 3
(Ansary et al., 2007b) Á 3 3 3 Á À 3 C++ À 3
(Ansary et al., 2007a) Á 3 3 3 Á À Á Â 3 C++ À 3
(Bai et al., 2010) Á Â À 3 À 3 3 À
(Bespalov et al., 2006) Á 3 3 Á À 3 3 À
(Biasotti et al., 2006) Á 3 Â À 3 3 À 3
(Cao et al., 2006) Á 3 Á Á 3 À
(Cardone et al., 2006) Á 3 Â À 3 3 À 3
(Chen et al., 2012) Á Â À 3 3 À 3
(Daras et al., 2006) Á 3 3 3 Á À 3 À 3
(Daras and Axenopoulos, 2009) Á 3 3 3 Á À Á Â 3 À
(Daras and Axenopoulos, 2010) Á 3 3 3 Á À Á Â 3 À 3
(Eitz et al., 2012) Á 3 3 3 Â Á 3 3 3 Python, C++ À
(El-Mehalawi and Miller, 2003b) Á Â Ã Á À 3 À
(El-Mehalawi and Miller, 2003a) Á Â Ã Á À 3 À
(Fisher and Hanrahan, 2010) Á 3 3 Â 3 Å 3 Á
(Fu et al., 2008) À Á Â À À 3 À
(Funkhouser et al., 2003) 3 Â 3 Á Ã Ä 3 3 C À 3
(Gao et al., 2006) Á Â 3 Â À 3 3 À
(Gao et al., 2010) Á Â 3 À À 3 À
(Getto and Fellner, 2015) Á 3 3 Â Ä 3 Á
(Grabner et al., 2014) À Á Â 3 3 3 À Ã Ä Á
(Grabner et al., 2015) À Á Â 3 3 3 À Ã Ä 3 Á 3
(Hong et al., 2006) Á Â 3 3 3 Á À 3 À
(Hou et al., 2005) Á Á À 3 Á
(Huangfu et al., 2016) Á Â À À 3 3 À 3
(Izadinia et al., 2016) Á Á Â À 3
(Kriegel et al., 2003) Á 3 3 Á À 3 À 3
(Kuo and Cheng, 2007) Á 3 3 Á À 3 À
(Leifman et al., 2005) Á 3 3 3 Á À 3 3 Á Á 3
(Leng and Qin, 2008) Á Á 3 À Ã 3 Á Á 3
(Leng and Xiong, 2009) Á Á 3 À Ã 3 Á Á 3
(Liu et al., 2006) Á À À 3 3 À 3
(Mademlis et al., 2006) Á Â Ã Ä 3 3 Á À 3 À 3
(Mademlis et al., 2009) Á Â Ã Ä 3 3 Á À 3 À 3
(Min et al., 2003) Á Á 3 À Á Ã À 3
GRAPP 2017 - International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications
310
Table 4: (continued from Table 3) This tabular overview lists the analyzed CAD retrieval approaches from a CAD application
user’s point of view. All approaches are ordered alphabetically according to the lastname of the first author.
Geometric Input
Non-Manifoldness
& Noise
Level of Detail
Invariants
Metadata
Query Method
Subpart Matching
Goodness
Availability
Integration
Method
Performance
(Ohbuchi et al., 2005) Á 3 3 À À 3 À
(Papadakis et al., 2007) Á 3 Á À 3 À 3
(Papadakis et al., 2010) Á 3 Á À 3 À
(Pu et al., 2007) Á 3 3 À Á À 3
(Shih et al., 2007) Á 3 3 Â À 3 À 3
(Stavropoulos et al., 2010) Á 3 3 Á À 3 3 C++ À 3
(Sunil and Pande, 2008) Á 3 3 À À 3 3 À 3
(Tao et al., 2015) Á Â À À 3 3 À 3
(Vranic, 2005) Á 3 Á À 3 À 3
(Wang et al., 2008) Á Â 3 Á À Ã Ä 3 Á Á
(Yoon et al., 2010) Á 3 3 3 Á Á 3 À
(Zarpalas et al., 2006) Á Á À 3 À
(Zehtaban et al., 2016) Á Â À À Ä 3 À
Legend:
Geometrical Input À point clouds, Á polygonal data, Â analytical data, Ã CSG data, Ä volume data
Manifoldness & Noise 3, if non-manifold / noisy input data is supported
Level Of Detail 3, if level of detail matching is supported
Invariants metric is invariant towards À isometric, Á affine, Â general non-rigid transformations
Metadata 3, if a content’s metadata is used by the matching algorithm
Query Method À by example, Á by sketch, Â by image, Ã by free text, Ä by taxonomy, Å by context
Subpart Matching 3, if it is possible to query for a subpart only
Goodness 3, if the presented approach is evaluated towards precision and recall
Availability 3, if the source code of the reference implementation is available
Integration the programming languages natively supported by the implementation
Method À a primary, content-based retrieval method, Á a secondary method on top of primary method
Performance 3, if the presented approach is evaluated towards computational time and memory consumption
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