New Product Design with Automatic Scheme Generation

Abstract

Traditionally, design schemes were usually drawn manually or with the help of graphics software. These methods are usually labor-intensive and time-consuming. The design field calls for advanced product design, which will be highly efficient and meet more individualized demands for customized manufacturing. In this paper, a new design approach is introduced to assist designers to improve the efficiency of product design with automatic sample generation algorithms. This approach mainly consists of two parts: design scheme generation and sketch inversion. For design scheme generation, we adopt the generative adversarial networks to extract features from the existing product images and generate new design schemes based on these features. This is followed by post-processing including wire frame design and sketch design. Meanwhile, for sketch inversion, the sketches are generated and input along with the corresponding color images to train the sketch inversion model. With this model, hand-drawn sketches are transferred into color design schemes. We take watch designing as an example to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on design scheme generation and sketch inversion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed design scheme generation method can generate new product design schemes, and further sketch inversion process can transfer them into color design schemes with high quality.