An Enhanced Graph Representation and Heuristic Tabu Search Approach for Flexible and Efficient 3D Shape Matching

3D shape matching is widely used in engineering design for model retrieval, shape similarity assessment or collaborative development. In this paper, an enhanced graph representation and heuristic tabu search based approach is presented to enable flexible and efficient 3D shape matching. The core idea includes (1) generic shape features are recognized from boundary representation (B-rep) of 3D shape as many as possible to incorporate domain design knowledge, (2) an enhanced graph representation of 3D shape is constructed by mixing faces of B-rep and recognized features, to achieve meaningful matching results at low-level of faces or high-level of features satisfying various design intents, and (3) a tabu list of possible improper matches is built to reduce the search space so that the optimal result can be efficiently obtained. Finally, Two examples are demonstrated to show that both two levels of 3D shape matching results can be efficiently obtained for various design intents in the engineering applications, only not more than 18% computation time is required when compared with a typical shape matching method, and it takes only 20 s when the number of matching nodes is more than 460.