Coded shape representation and its application to mechanical and structural design

Abstract

Although it is widely accepted that shape plays an important role in mechanical and structural design, most of the shape models up to now have discussed the problem in terms of numerical processing framework. But the quickly increasing diversity and complexity of products calls for more flexible and qualitiative models which will permit the interpretation of the semantics of the product shape. Therefore, we developed a new 2D shape model based on the idea of directional code. The main feature of this model is that a shape is represented in the form of a list so that all shape minipulations can be reduced to list operations . Hence, semantic meanings can be easily added and the form features can be extracted without any difficulty.