Transform-based surface analysis and representation for CAD models

In most Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems, the topological and geometrical information in a CAD model is usually represented by the edge-based data structure. With the emergence of concurrent engineering, such issues as product design, manufacturing, and process planning are considered simultaneously at the design stage. The need for the development of high-level models for completely documenting the geometry of a product and supporting manufacturing applications, such as automating the verification of a design for manufacturing (DIM) rules and generating process plans, becomes apparent;This dissertation has addressed the development of a generalized framework for high-level geometric representations of CAD models and form features to automate algorithmic search and retrieval of manufacturing information;A new wavelet-based ranking algorithm is developed to generate surface-based representations as input for the extraction of form features with non-planar surfaces in CAD models. The objective of using a wavelet-based shape analysis approach is to overcome the main limitation of the alternative feature extraction approaches, namely their restriction to planar surfaces or simple curved surfaces;A transform-invariant coding system for CAD models by multi-scale wavelet representations is also presented. The coding procedure is based on both the internal regions and external contours of topology entities---faces