A Digital 3-D Model Library

Ilknur Icke, Computer Science

Background

Large databases of 3-D data are becoming available on the Internet, and in various domains such as Computer Aided Design (CAD), Molecular Biology (3-D Protein Models), Computer Graphics, Medicine and Archeology. For instance, National Design Repository is an online database of CAD models, Protein Data Bank [2] is an online database of 3-D biological macromolecule structures, HUGO is a 3-D anatomical database based on the Visible Human Project [1].

In most CAD databases, the models are pre-classified into groups and it is possible to browse through these groups. But what if the user wants to search for something specific in the database? Even if each model is associated with a descriptive name it might not help much. In some cases, the user might provide an example model and would like to find the most similar models. Therefore, just a database of the models without a content based search functionality would not be useful.

Proposal

In this document, I propose a 3-D CAD model library with search functionality. There are various web sites that provide free 3-D models, the initial database can easily be built using these models. Then, a web-based search engine can be built on top this database. The search engine can be thought of as independent from the database. Moreover, the format of the 3-D model files is not important. The search engine uses a shape based approach, meaning that the 3-D models are preprocessed and converted into a representation that is more suitable for similarity comparisons. For a more technical discussion of 3-D Model Search Engines, please refer to [3].

Benefits

Besides being an application of my research on 3-D shape similarity measures, such a library with a search engine could help 3-D designers locate the models they need for their work.

References