Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 June 2020
The capability to manufacture at home is continually increasing with technologies, such as 3D printing. However, the ability to design products suitable for manufacture and use remains a highly-skilled and knowledge intensive activity. This has led to ‘content creators’ providing vast repositories of manufacturable products for society, however challenges remain in the search & retrieval of models. This paper presents the surrogate model convolutional neural networks approach to search and retrieve CAD models by mapping them directly to their real-world photographed counterparts.