Abstract
It is very often necessary to search for similar parts during designing a new product because its parts are often easily designed by modifying existing similar parts. In this way, the design time and cost can be reduced. Thus it would be nice to have an efficient similarity comparison algorithm that can be used anytime in the design process. There have been many approaches to compare shape similarity between two solids. In this paper, two parts represented in B-Rep is compared in two steps: one for overall appearances and the other for detail features. In the first step, geometric information is used in low level of detail for easy and fast pre-classification by the overall appearance. In the second step, feature information is used to compare the detail shape in high level of detail to find more similar design. To realize the idea above, a multi resolution algorithm is proposed so that a given solid is described by an overall appearance in a low resolution and by detail features in high resolution. Using this multi-resolution representation, parts can be compared based on the overall appearance first so that the number of parts to be compared in high resolution is reduced, and then detail features are investigated to retrieve the most similar part. In this way, computational time can be reduced by the fast classification in the first step while reliability can be preserved by detail comparison in the second step.