Similarity-based partial image retrieval system for engineering drawings

Designers of mechanical products frequently refer to engineering drawings which are stored as image data in databases to design a new mechanical product efficiently. Multiple mechanical parts are usually drawn on each engineering drawing. Therefore designers want to find engineering drawings containing parts similar to a query image in the shape of a part drawn on an engineering drawing. In this paper, we propose a novel similarity based partial image retrieval system for engineering drawings. A unique aspect of this system is that a graph representation is utilized to robustly find engineering drawings containing similar parts which are invariant to the size, position, and rotation. We verified the performance for the similarity based partial image retrieval system through experiments using industrial engineering drawings. The results show that the top five similar engineering drawings for every query image are always accurately retrieved by our proposed system. This finding suggests that this system could be useful for the reuse of stored engineering drawings.