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A new 3-D graphics search engine

In hopes of offering more information, computing researchers have developed a new search engine that can mine catalogs of three-dimensional objects, like airplane parts or architectural features.

All the users have to do is sketch what they're thinking of, and the search engines can produce comparable objects.

"The idea of information and knowledge, and retrieval of knowledge, has been something I've been intrigued with for a long time. This gives it a more solidified meaning," said Karthik Ramani, a Purdue University professor who created a system that can find computer-designed industrial parts.

Ramani expects his search engine will serve huge industrial companies whose engineers often waste time and energy designing a specialized part when someone else has already created, used or rejected something similar.

Rick Jeffs, senior engineering specialist at a Caterpillar Inc. engine center in Lafayette, Ind., believes Ramani's technology could help the company simplify its inventory. Jeffs' center alone has tens of thousands of different parts.

With the purdue search engine, designers could sketch the part they need and instantly see dozens in inventory that might fit the bill. If an item seems close, but not quite right, designers can see a "skeleton" of the part and manipulate it on their computer screens -- make it longer or shorter or curved, for example -- and then query the database again. Mainstream search engines, meanwhile, are still trying to master 2-D images.

For example, Google Inc.'s picture search program delivers pretty good results but can't actually examine the images it serves up. It mines the text surrounding the photos, and hopes for success. However, 3-D search engines have begun to emerge as improvements in computing power and interactive modeling software have deepened the pool of designs available to query - not only in industrial settings but also in highly detailed online virtual worlds.

Princeton University professor Thomas Funkhouser and colleagues have put a 3-D search engine on the Web that lets anyone sketch an object using a computer mouse, add a textual description, then search for similar models in design databases. The results can be startling. Draw a big potato, and the system responds with a bunch of, well, potato-looking objects -- and a few urns.

Those seem wrong until you rotate your potato, orienting it vertically instead of horizontally, and see your sketch actually does resemble an urn, narrow on top and bottom and bulging in the middle. Certainly this makes old-fashioned keyword searches seem a blunt instrument.

Source: Manorama Online

Posted by nakul at May 4, 2004 06:53 AM | TrackBack