Identification of Similar and Complementary Subparts in B-Rep Mechanical Models

Content-based retrieval is particularly important for exploiting company model databases and online catalogs. To allow the identification of reusable part models possibly fitting with the product under development, methods for the similarity assessment between shapes should be provided in terms of both global and partial shape matching. In this perspective, this paper proposes a method directly working on B-rep models for 3D model retrieval, which does not require any model conversion to triangular meshes and in addition to global and partial matching allows the identification of components that may likely be assembled with a given model.