CAD-based computer vision: from CAD models to relational graphs

The authors outline their approach for automatic translation of geometric entities produced by a CAD system into a relational graph structure. They have developed a system which uses 3-D object descriptions created on a commercial CAD system and expressed in the industry-standard IGES form, and performs geometric inferencing to object a relational graph representation of the object which can be stored in a database of models of object recognition. Details of the IGES standard, the geometric inference engine, and some formal properties of 3-D models are discussed. In addition to the process of translation from one data format to another, the interference engine extracts higher-level information from the CAD model and stores it explicitly in the new data structure. The higher-level features will allow the search space explored during the object recognition stage to be pruned early.<>