Machine Interpretation of CAD Data for Manufacturing Applications QIANG JI AND MICHAEL M. MAREFAT University of Arizona, Tucson Machine interpretation of the shape of a component from CAD databases is an important problem in CAD/CAM, computer vision, and intelligent manufacturing. It can be used in CAD/CAM for evaluation of designs, in computer vision for machine recognition and machine inspection of objects, and in intelligent manufacturing for automating and integrating the link between design and manufacturing. This topic has been an active area of research since the late 70s, and a significant number of computational methods have been proposed to identify portions of the geometry of a part having engineering significance (here called features ).1 However, each proposed mechanism has been able to solve the problem only for components within a restricted geometric domain (such as polyhedral components), or only for components whose features interact with each other in a restricted manner. The purposes of this article are to review and summarize the development of research on machine recognition of features from CAD data, to discuss the advantages and potential problems of each approach, and to point out some of the promising directions future investigations may take. Since most
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