An incremental morphological analysis for semantical conversions

The form features recognition has often been studied in the context of manufacturing processes (generally machining processes). Therefore, this approach is not well suited for concurrent engineering, where co-designers should be able to interpret the samèform' as diierent`features' and to add their design semantics to the previous ones. However, they can also see new features that may include faces already used by previous features. It is thus necessary to analyze parts under design from diierent viewpoints. To do so we split this complex problem into two subproblems. The rst one, detects the elementary characteristics of the shape that enable the part to be coded in an intermediate parametric representation. The second one, would use this representation under viewpoint dependent rules. The rst problem, emphasized in this paper, is based on an analysis which generates a set of morphological features connected by geometric constraints. This analysis could be considered as a particular B-Rep to CSG conversion, where the CSG operators are deened as a set of shape modiiers instead of boolean operators.