Free-Form Feature Representation and Comparison

Knowledge Management systems have been applied to several areas in the manufacturing industry. These applications have been predominately text based, however, much of manufacturing’s information is related to geometric features. In this paper we describe a representation and content-based search method such that given a geometric specification, the knowledge of previous designs having similar feature requirements is returned. The technique uses curvature based shape index segmentation to construct an attributed graph-like descriptor for 2.5D free-form surface features, such as those found on stamped components. Efficient edit distance methods are applied for search. Experiments on a database of freeform features indicate feasible runtimes with favourable results.