Satoshi Kanai

Professor Dept. of Systems Engineering
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology
Hokkaido University, JAPAN

Biography:

Prof. Kanai got his PhD in 1987 from Hokkaido University. He joined in Faculty of Engineering of Tokyo Institute of Technology from 1989 to 1996. Then he moved to the Faculty of Information Science and Technology of Hokkaido University in 1997. He is an organizer of SIG of “Digital styling design” in Japan Society Precision Engineers. His research area includes 3D geometric modeling, virtual prototyping and their applications to rapid prototyping of information appliance. He is a member of IEEE and ACM/SIGGRAPH.

Talk Title: 3D mesh model retrieval and 3D human hand modeling for supporting product design

Abstract: Japanese manufacturers of consumer electronic products are facing difficult situation of their product differentiation in the market from the aspect of functions and prices, reflecting the matured market and decline in price competitiveness. One of the breakthroughs of this situation is to make their products more value-added ones by designing them with more attractive and more ergonomic-conscious styling. Computer-aided functions which the current commercial CAD systems are lacking, are strongly need in the manufacturers to effectively support these upstream styling design process. In this presentation, two solutions for supporting the upstream styling design process are introduced; 1) Content based 3D mesh model retrieval system from hand-written sketch, and 2) 3D human hand modeling for virtual ergonomic assessment for the 3D CAD model. The proposed content based 3D mesh model retrieval from hand-written sketch helps industrial designers to efficiently find a set of 3D models in the stage of concept design or positioning analysis of the styling design. In the system, the user puts a query in the form of a 2D hand-written sketch to a 3D mesh model database, and the system automatically returns a set of mesh models whose 2D views are similar to the input sketch. Generic Fourier Descriptor and Local Binary Pattern which are features invariant to rotation, translation and scaling of 2D images are used to measure dissimilarities between a query sketch and images generated from 3D models. While, the proposed 3D human hand modeling for virtual ergonomic assessment system enables the designers to evaluate stability and ease of grasp of product exteriors by combining a 3D CAD model and “digital hand” model. The digital hand model consists of precise 3D models of a hand link structure and deformable external skins. The hand models also have rich dimensional variations of Japanese adults based on measurements. The simulator find one of the possible grasp postures of the digital hand. In the grasp posture, the system evaluates the stability of the grasp based on force-closure theory for the contact point set. The system can eliminate wasteful physical prototypes in the upstream design process of hand-held consumer products. The effectiveness and accuracy of the simulator was verified through measurements on real human grasps.