February 28, 2006  |  Web site allows online search of catalogued parts using ‘doodle'

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — If you can doodle, you can find the catalogued part you're looking for through a new, online 3DSeek® portal developed by Imaginestics LLC, a Purdue Research Park company.

Incorporating technology created at the Purdue Research and Education Center for Information Systems in Engineering (PRECISE) Lab at Purdue University, 3DSeek® is a new kind of search engine that lets users find items in an online catalog without ever needing to know the items' names, part numbers or keywords. Thanks to a major advancement in shape search technology, all the user needs is a freehand sketch – a doodle. The public has access to the search engine at http://www.3d-seek.com

The 3DSeek® software was built on top of technology created by PRECISE Director Karthik Ramani and his colleagues at Purdue, and funded by the National Science Foundation. Ramani, who also is an NSF CAREER Awardee and the chief scientist of Imaginestics, has led the way toward search algorithms that ranked among the worlds fastest for a certain application: comparing 2D and 3D computer-aided design files and images that are ubiquitous in industry.

From there, further collaboration between university and Imaginestics' researchers resulted in a system that required only critical shape characteristics, 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 favorite means of communication for engineers and designers.

The company initially developed 3DSeek® portal mainly for manufacturing firms, which constantly are looking for hinges, bolts, conveyor belts, motors and a host of other products. For those firms, noted Errol Arkilic, the NSF officer overseeing the SBIR awards, "this search engine can help find the proverbial needle in the haystack. By allowing manufacturers to re-deploy and re-purpose parts from existing catalogs, the tool can make it easier for businesses to design complex mechanical systems."

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.

"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," said 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 then 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 industry-standard 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 or even a complete part redesign.

"It's the difference between describing a part over the phone and seeing it in person," Rathod said. "You can look at it visually instead of explaining it in words."

The 3DSeek® portal currently contains more than 6,000 parts and continues to grow as suppliers manually upload their files or as the system's i-crawler web spider discovers parts online. A related technology, i-prowler, hunts for CAD and image files on a user's computer and securely communicates the indexed information to the online database, making it available for on-line search.

Even global corporations can have difficulty tracking supplier parts 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 percent 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.

About Imaginestics
Imaginestics is a privately-held software and services company founded in December 2002. It is emerging as the leader in knowledge-based systems for the manufacturing and life sciences industry. Imaginestics' mission is to unleash the power of existing engineering and manufacturing systems through an integrated product suite that taps companies' past and present knowledge and optimizes their future development. Imaginestics' product suite includes, i-compare, i-migrate, i-config, i-parts and i-advisor.