When users experience CADSEEK's accuracy they logically wonder what compromises must have been needed to achieve it. Compared to the competition, the opposite is actually true. CADSEEK is without question the most accurate but does so without compromising performance in any way.
iSEEK's CADSEEK technology was created from the vision of Dr. Abir Qamhiyah, along with the assistance of Dr. Donald Flugrad, the National Science Foundation, and also support from several leading industrial companies. The goal was to develop a technology capable of accurately capturing the shape of 3D digital designs to foster part reuse and numerous other use cases. While matching similar designs is valuable, to be really useful the technology also has to be able to determine the degree of similarity, and do so in a fast, scalable and encrypted format.
CADSEEK transforms complex shape into a purely numerical signature that precisely describes the shape of even highly complex 3D designs. A CADSEEK signature is a fingerprint that ... when compared to a database of other fingerprints ... instantaneously calculates the degree of the similarity of the designs.
CADSEEK is more accurate than any other shape matching application, in part, because it captures every nuance of a design's shape at the resolution of CAD. Therefore, it has almost infinitely more data to work than other methods that use a simple parametric value like surface area or volume to match designs.
Without accuracy, relevant search results are co-mingled with blinding clutter. Like in a Google search, when relevant matches are listed on the third page of results, or not found at all, users will loose patience, searches will be quickly abandoned, and users will revert to less efficient methods.
All other shape-search applications only provide a clue that two items might be similar, i.e., they have nearly the same surface area so they might be relevant. In contrast, CADSEEK provides evidence of the degree of similarity, with such high sensitivity that it can even detect small variances in the level of tessellation in two otherwise identical designs. While finding duplicates is useful, there are actually far more use cases for matching similar designs.
The magic of CADSEEK is that fingerprints have the intelligence to enable an instantaneous calculation of the degree of similarity, even in multi-million item databases. This intelligence enables:
All CADSEEK software is installed, and all processes occur within an enterprise's firewall. This means that design files never have to leave the enterprise.
That being said ... the algorithm that creates the CADSEEK signatures is a one-way mathematical transformation that is a form of encryption:
Every CADSEEK search is performed in real-time instead of being a recalled result from a previously performed comparison. This means CADSEEK enables a dynamic search database. With CADSEEK, users can import a new design, such as a design received from a colleague, customer or supplier, and produce instantaneous search results without long delays for encoding the design or comparing it to the design database.
CADSEEK is able to encode designs in a few seconds and perform searches in large databases in under two seconds. Analytics reports can operate in million-item databases quickly and save thousands and thousands of human hours of analysis time. For example, an Analytics report in a 12,000 item database requires 144,000,000 comparisons, which CADSEEK Analytics can complete on an i7 laptop in less than 3 seconds.
CADSEEK signatures are numerical which enables fast seek times which allow databases to easily scale into the millions of designs. John Deere's testing of the CADSEEK API showed 0.02 second search response across a multi-million item database.
CADSEEK is not a learning algorithm that has to be trained on thousands of similar items. Instead, CADSEEK is able to capture the shape of any 3-dimensional geometry including small standard parts, large mechanical assemblies, tiny protein models and animation characters, all without any customization of the CADSEEK encoding algorithm. Any of these item's CADSEEK signature can be compared to any other item, such as comparing the signature of a protein molecule to a tractor chassis assembly. While the similarity will be incredibly low, the key point is that the creation or composition of the signature does not change based on the type of data.
CAD Format: CADSEEK can encode all types of native CAD (both models and assemblies), neutral and derivative formats such as STEP, IGES or STL, and even 3D laser scans.
Discrete Parts & Assemblies: CADSEEK can encode designs from bolts to satellite assemblies. The CADSEEK algorithm can even encode non continuous geometry and weldments.
Industries: to CADSEEK, the origin of a 3D digital shape is irrelevant. The identical CADSEEK algorithm has been used to encode designs in numerous industries including: automotive, heavy equipment, fixtures, appliances, aerospace, chemistry, bio-chemistry, machine tools, medical devices, electronics, construction, paleontology, body scans and sculpture.
CADSEEK searches are not reliant on attributes or parametric values in any way ... so even when designs lack the expected attribute descriptors, those designs can still be found based on the similarity of their overall geometric shape.
In some cases designs have unreliable dimensions, but in these situations CADSEEK is still able to encode shape and provide accurate search results.
Each CADSEEK fingerprint is numerical and a very small fraction of the size of the original native file, providing massive scalability for a CADSEEK search index.
The process of encoding a CAD library to create a shape-search index is fully automated with no human requirement for sorting, tagging, or classifying. This automation and the speed allows deployments to be performed in days rather than months.
Keeping the CADSEEK Search Index synchronized with the PLM or other database is also a fully automated process.
The first step in performing a shape search is selecting a search target ... a design that is used as a seed to find all others like it. CADSEEK applications enable nearly a dozen different ways to select a search target including: attribute filtering, file import, visual browsing, import from CAD, import from PLM, extract from assembly, and search from photographs.
CADSEEK search is also flexible because iSEEK provides several applications, designed to fit into preferred workflows. The CADSEEK API allows shape-search capability to be embedded in other applications such as dashboards, catalogs and websites.
CADSEEK fingerprints are identical regardless of the environment or scope of the CAD database they were created from. This means that a supplier or customer can create a fingerprint locally and send it to a partner, and the search results will be the same as if the partner had created the CADSEEK fingerprint.
CADSEEK is not embedded within the constraints of a CAD or PLM system, providing it the ability to comingle data from multiple PLMs, CAD vaults or folders; and attributes can be sourced from the PLM, ERP, spreadsheets and delimited files. CADSEEK can be selective about which status of files, and also which attributes are included in the search index
Independence also allows CADSEEK applications to include visualization and design inspection and compare tools, which are especially valuable to users without access to CAD.
CADSEEK operates with normal computer hardware, both for server and client hardware, and with surprisingly low requirements for RAM and disk space. This includes the initial batch encoding process, as well as normal operation.
