Manufacturing primitive-based object identification using recognition-by-components

It has been recognized that lead time and costs can be reduced by representing product designs in terms of manufacturing features such as surface finish, accuracy, or machining operations. Usually, a design environment supporting such representations is referred to as a primitive-based CAD system. This paper describes an object recognition system for range images which exploits the primitive-based CAD database information to reduce set up time and accelerate object identification. The heart of our work resides in modeling objects as collections of instantiated machining manufacturing primitives. This permits the implementation of a recognition-by-components approach using surface topology analysis. Thus, the main recognition task is broken down into the less stringent ones of primitive identification and instantiation, followed by the actual object model indexing. The result is faster recognition as well as automatic generation of object models from the CAD output databases