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A 3D dental biometrics framework and a pose invariant dental identification (PIDI) technique are proposed for human identification in this study. As best as we can tell, this study is the first attempt at 3D dental biometrics. Using 3D overcomes a number of key hurdles that plague 2D methods in dental identification. 60 Postmortem (PM) samples and 200 Ante mortem (AM) samples taken from multi ethnic Asian groups (Chinese, Indian and Malay) are used in this study. The PIDI technique includes algorithms for feature extraction, feature description and correspondence. The proposed feature extraction algorithm can extract the salient points from the scanned model of dental cast. The proposed feature description and the correspondence algorithm have been tested and shown to be more robust to rigid transformations compared with the related work. Preliminary experimental result achieves 94% rank-1 accuracy in a human-assisted process, while in an automated identification process, the rank-1 accuracy decreases to 80%. In addition, the developed methodology, as it is also feasible to be applied to identifying severely corrupted dental, could promptly provide a potential candidate list in mass disasters before expert investigation. The high accuracy, fast retrieval speed and the facilitated identification process suggest that the developed 3D framework is more suitable for practical use in dental biometrics applications in the future. The limitations and future work are also presented. It could be used adjunctively with the traditional 2D X-ray radiograph identification scheme to improve the efficiency of current identification process.

This paper presents a novel approach to the 3D CAD model retrieval, whereby the 3D models are treated and matched as undirected graphs. While there is much success made in the matching of graphs based on their spectral decomposition, most of these approaches consider smooth surfaces and are not suitable for CAD models because of their complex topology and singular structure. In the proposed approach, the models are simplified based on the piecewise flat properties of the surfaces first, and a perturbed Laplacian spectrum approach is then applied to characterize the shape. These spectral values are used as samples for spectral distribution estimation. The perturbed spectral distributions of different models are then compared by their KL-divergence for model retrieval. The proposed approach is tested with models from known 3D CAD database for verification.

The matching of particular types of CAD models to existing physical models can provide invaluable support to the process of CAD design and reuse. To meet the demand for fast and robust algorithms to detect predefined models in database, an local invariant model matching approach is proposed in this paper. It first maps the 3D CAD model to 2D principal image plane by its first two principal components, and then finds affine invariant key points in the 2D image. The CAD model matching problem is implemented as key points matching. Experimental results show the proposed 3D model retrieval method performs fairly well in retrieving similar models from a database of 3D CAD models.

Companies are moving towards quickly providing better customer-centric products and services improve market share and market size with continuously growing revenue. As such, the effective collaboration among customers, developers, suppliers, and manufacturers throughout the entire product lifecycle is becoming much more important for the most advanced competitiveness. To address this need, a framework for product lifecycle collaboration is proposed in this study. The details of these collaboration models throughout the entire product lifecycle are depicted. As one of the key elements in product lifecycle collaboration, technology to support collaborative product manufacturing is proposed, developed and implemented in this study. It is hoped that the developed technology for collaborative product manufacturing will lay a frontier basis for further research and development in product lifecycle management.

Reports are significant and critical deliverables provided to end users by enterprise information systems, such as PLM and ERP. They provide structured and concise information for end users to effectively capture the status of resources, track the progress of jobs and analyse the profitability of products, etc. Reports are also key documents that help managers make decisions, perform planning activities and communicate with partners. At present, enterprise information systems are usually developed with fundamental reporting capabilities and require further design and development to provide customized reporting functions to individual customers at an implementation stage. The customization of reporting functions to a particular company is time-consuming and it is difficult to reuse the results for other companies. This paper proposes a configuration-based flexible reporting method. In this method, a complete reporting system consists of two parts: report configurations and computer programs. Reporting configurations contain instructions that instruct computer programs to generate reports. As computer programs work according to instructions in configurations rather than any hard-coded report generation logics and configurations can be represented in a neural format, report generation logics are loosely coupled with computer programs. As a result, such a reporting system can generate reports for different companies by providing different sets of configurations. Therefore, the proposed method enables to achieve a highly flexible reporting solution that can be easily tailored for different companies through reconfiguration with little redesign and redevelopment. In addition, the method also offers end users opportunities to reconfigure reporting functions according to their needs at a production stage. A prototype system has been developed to verify and demonstrate the method.

One of the challenging problems that hinder the development of distributed design systems is the contradiction of large CAD files and the limited speed to share them over the Internet and Web. 3D streaming technique, which can allow effective and efficient dispatch and access of large-volume CAD data as a series of patched streams across the Internet, provides a promising solution to overcome the obstacle. Geometric simplification (or decimation) of 3D models is a key algorithm to realize the streaming technique. In this paper, a new geometric simplification algorithm has been developed, in which two criteria are the crucial elements to control the collapse process for edges in 3D VRML models to reduce the amount of information. After the simplification and sharing of a model, a developed refinement algorithm is carried out to restore the model from its simplified version back to its original, through combining the simplified model with some reconstruction data generated during the simplification process, therefore, to realize the streaming information sharing. The major feature of the simplification algorithm is that it has incorporated some advantages of the previously developed vertex decimation approach and edge collapse approach. Meanwhile, the mechanism of adaptive threshold parameters adopted in this work enhances the adaptability of the algorithm for various applications. Through case studies and comparisons with some related works, the algorithm shows good performance and potentials in terms of effectiveness, adaptability and robustness.

Most companies in tooling industry position themselves as partners of large companies and operate in a made-to-order fashion. As the product lifecycle is becoming short, the time for tooling companies to design and produce tools shrinks remarkably. To survive in such a competitive market, many tooling companies are seeking solutions to shorten their entire business cycle by improving their working efficiency and productivity with effective collaboration. This paper presents a collaborative engine, capable of supporting horizontal and vertical integration by providing a computer-supported collaborative environment. The engine has been modeled and designed as a foundation for the development of collaborative environments for tooling companies to improve business performance by enhancing internal collaboration, maximizing information sharing and reuse, and seamlessly linking business activities. A collaborative design environment has been prototyped to demonstrate the efficiency of the engine.