Determination of appropriate level of detail of a three-dimensional computer-aided design model from a permissible dissimilarity for fully automated simplification

Abstract

The level of detail required for a three-dimensional computer-aided design model varies according to its purpose. Thus, it is necessary to develop an automated method for controlling the level of detail of three-dimensional computer-aided design models to facilitate the use of three-dimensional computer-aided design models in different application areas. When multiple three-dimensional computer-aided design models need to be simplified in a batch mode without user intervention, it would be advantageous if the appropriate level of details for the models were automatically determined. This study proposes a new and automated method to determine the appropriate level of detail of each three-dimensional computer-aided design model during the simplification phase. To achieve this goal, the concept of an “appropriate level of detail for simplification” was defined from the viewpoint of shape dissimilarity. After that, an algorithm was developed to determine the appropriate level of detail of a model by adopting the feature-based simplification method and the shape distribution–based comparison method. Finally, a prototype system was invented to verify the proposed method through experiments, in which the appropriate level of details for test cases were determined by the system.