Self-organizing network modelling of 3D objects

Advanced manufacturing is moving towards a new paradigm of ‘low-volume-high-mix’ production. There is an urgent need to develop effective representations of real-world 3D objects and further enable the matching and retrieval of engineering designs. This paper presents a new self-organizing network representation of 3D objects. Each voxel of the 3D object is a node in a network, and the edge is dependent on node closeness in space. Then, the network is self-organized by balancing attractive and repulsive forces between the nodes. Experimental results show the effectiveness of network representation by reassembling the geometry of 3D objects.