CAD mesh model simplification with assembly features preservation

This paper aims to investigate a CAD mesh model simplification method with assembly features preservation, in order to satisfy the requirement of assembly field for the information of 3D model. The proposed method simplifies a CAD mesh model as follows. Firstly, the notion of “conjugation” is incorporated into the definition of assembly features, with the purpose of benefitting the downstream applications such as assembly features recognition and preservation. Subsequently, the attributed adjacency graphs (AAGs) of the regionlevel-represented parts are established. The assembly features are automatically recognized by searching for conjugated subgraphs of every two AAGs based on subgraph isomorphism algorithm. In order to improve the efficiency of assembly features recognition, the characteristics of conjugated subgraphs are adopted to initialize the mapping matrix, and the “verifying while matching strategy” is used to verify the validity of every two newly founded vertices which are correspondingly matched. Then, simplified CAD mesh model with assembly features preserved is constructed after suppressing the common form features. The method is applied successfully to simplify the CAD mesh model with assembly features well preserved. Moreover, the tradeoff between the cost of time for conjugated subgraphs matching and the complexity of the to-be-matched parts is proven to be almost linear.