Forget word-based search engines. Cutting-edge algorithm can hunt through online catalogues using only a sketch; researchers say technology could become mainstream so consumers could just draw to find an exact match
A US-based company has created 3D-Seek: A new kind of search engine that lets users find items in an online catalogue without ever needing to know the items’ names, codes or keywords.
Thanks to advances in practical pattern recognition, all the user needs is a freehand sketch – a doodle, says the Indiana-based company.
The Purdue Research Park-based company, called Imaginestics, developed 3D-Seek and its associated catalogue mainly for manufacturing firms, which are constantly looking for bolts, hinges, conveyor belts, motors and a host of other products.
The search engine can help find the proverbial needle in the haystack, say the scientists involved in the project.
It allows manufacturers to re-deploy and re-purpose parts from existing catalogues, and the tool can also make it easier for businesses to design complex mechanical systems, they said.
Eventually, however, the basic search engine could prove equally useful for ordinary shoppers: Instead of having to go to the hardware store lugging, say, a specific plumbing joint, a customer could just sketch what he or she needed to find an exact match.
The 3D-Seek software was built on top of technology created by Karthik Ramani and his colleagues at Purdue Research and Education Centre for
Information Systems in Engineering (PRECISE) at Purdue University.
Ramani, who is the director of PRECISE and the chief scientist of Imaginestics, had led the way toward search algorithms that ranked among the world’s fastest.
From there, further collaboration between university and company researchers resulted in a system that required only shape characteristics, and not entire image files.
This allowed even faster search speeds and protected the proprietary information held by parts suppliers loading their products to the online database.
And as a bonus, the refined search could now glean important information from quick sketches, a favourite means of communication for engineers and designers.
“In order to make such a search engine commercially viable, we had to overcome the challenge of matching something as rudimentary as a doodle to a 3-D object – in seconds,” says Nainesh Rathod, co-founder and
President of Imaginestics. “This is important, as Web users have become accustomed to retrieving information instantaneously. Our shape-search engine processes data that are far more complex than those handled by the leading Internet search engines, and yet still finds results quickly.”
While researchers have been working for several years on software that can compare 3-D image files to each other, the new method is faster than most, and permits search “terms” that are far outside the norm. With the new tool, users can find in seconds what once took weeks of warehouse searches.
“It’s the difference between describing a part over the phone and seeing it in person,” added Rathod. “You can look at it visually instead of explaining it in words.”
The 3D-Seek catalogue currently contains more than 6,000 parts and continues to grow as suppliers upload their files, and as the system’s i-crawler Web spider discovers parts online.
A related technology, i-prowler, hunts for image files on a user’s computer and merges them with either the online database or an internal company catalogue – critical for large companies that may not have simple mechanisms to search internal inventories.
Even global corporations can have difficulty tracking supplies internally. According to Rathod, a Fortune 100 manufacturer recently estimated that lack of a proper search technology resulted in duplicate purchases for 10 to 16 per cent of parts.
One reason is that factories creating the same product, yet located continents apart, will go to different suppliers for the same component. Those suppliers may have to independently engineer the components from scratch, which can be costly. With an easily searchable company-wide database, even metric conversion would not stand in the way of a part search.
On the net: You can try the freehand-search online at the 3D-Seek portal: www.3d-seek.com.
http://www.mumbaimirror.com/net/mmp...§id=7&contentid=2007070403060725099046468
Thanks to advances in practical pattern recognition, all the user needs is a freehand sketch – a doodle, says the Indiana-based company.
It allows manufacturers to re-deploy and re-purpose parts from existing catalogues, and the tool can also make it easier for businesses to design complex mechanical systems, they said.
Eventually, however, the basic search engine could prove equally useful for ordinary shoppers: Instead of having to go to the hardware store lugging, say, a specific plumbing joint, a customer could just sketch what he or she needed to find an exact match.
The 3D-Seek software was built on top of technology created by Karthik Ramani and his colleagues at Purdue Research and Education Centre for
Information Systems in Engineering (PRECISE) at Purdue University.
Ramani, who is the director of PRECISE and the chief scientist of Imaginestics, had led the way toward search algorithms that ranked among the world’s fastest.
From there, further collaboration between university and company researchers resulted in a system that required only shape characteristics, and not entire image files.
This allowed even faster search speeds and protected the proprietary information held by parts suppliers loading their products to the online database.
And as a bonus, the refined search could now glean important information from quick sketches, a favourite means of communication for engineers and designers.
“In order to make such a search engine commercially viable, we had to overcome the challenge of matching something as rudimentary as a doodle to a 3-D object – in seconds,” says Nainesh Rathod, co-founder and
President of Imaginestics. “This is important, as Web users have become accustomed to retrieving information instantaneously. Our shape-search engine processes data that are far more complex than those handled by the leading Internet search engines, and yet still finds results quickly.”
While researchers have been working for several years on software that can compare 3-D image files to each other, the new method is faster than most, and permits search “terms” that are far outside the norm. With the new tool, users can find in seconds what once took weeks of warehouse searches.
“It’s the difference between describing a part over the phone and seeing it in person,” added Rathod. “You can look at it visually instead of explaining it in words.”
The 3D-Seek catalogue currently contains more than 6,000 parts and continues to grow as suppliers upload their files, and as the system’s i-crawler Web spider discovers parts online.
A related technology, i-prowler, hunts for image files on a user’s computer and merges them with either the online database or an internal company catalogue – critical for large companies that may not have simple mechanisms to search internal inventories.
Even global corporations can have difficulty tracking supplies internally. According to Rathod, a Fortune 100 manufacturer recently estimated that lack of a proper search technology resulted in duplicate purchases for 10 to 16 per cent of parts.
One reason is that factories creating the same product, yet located continents apart, will go to different suppliers for the same component. Those suppliers may have to independently engineer the components from scratch, which can be costly. With an easily searchable company-wide database, even metric conversion would not stand in the way of a part search.
On the net: You can try the freehand-search online at the 3D-Seek portal: www.3d-seek.com.
http://www.mumbaimirror.com/net/mmp...§id=7&contentid=2007070403060725099046468