Post-Doctoral Research Visit F/M Building a benchmark for sketch-based modeling

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Contract type : Fixed-term contract

Level of qualifications required : PhD or equivalent

Fonction : Post-Doctoral Research Visit

Level of experience : Recently graduated

About the research centre or Inria department

The Inria centre at Université Côte d'Azur includes 42 research teams and 9 support services. The center’s staff (about 500 people) is made up of scientists of different nationalities, engineers, technicians and administrative staff. The teams are mainly located on the university campuses of Sophia Antipolis and Nice as well as Montpellier, in close collaboration with research and higher education laboratories and establishments (Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, INRAE, INSERM ...), but also with the regional economic players.

With a presence in the fields of computational neuroscience and biology, data science and modeling, software engineering and certification, as well as collaborative robotics, the Inria Centre at Université Côte d'Azur  is a major player in terms of scientific excellence through its results and collaborations at both European and international levels.

Context

Computer Aided Design (CAD) is a multi-billion dollar industry responsible for the digital design of almost all manufactured goods. It leverages parametric modeling, which allows dimensions of a design to be changed, facilitating physically-based optimization and design remixing by non-experts. But CAD’s potential is diminished by the difficulty of creating parametric models: in addition to mastering design principles, professionals must learn complex CAD software interfaces.

To promote effective modeling strategies and creative flow, design educators advocate freehand drawing as a preliminary step to parametric modeling. The goal of our research is to convert freehand drawings into parametric CAD models that can be reused in downstream applications. To inform this research, we aim at creating a benchmark of design drawings and corresponding CAD models.

Assignment

Before converting design drawings into CAD models, we must first understand how designers create such drawings. What lines do they draw? How do these lines relate to the intended CAD model? How accurate is the perspective projection in a typical drawing? To answer these questions, we will collect professional drawings and their corresponding CAD models.

Our work focuses on concept sketches that designers draw to explain a shape they have in mind. Designers create these sketches following long-standing principles of perspective drawing, e.g. they employ intermediate construction lines for perspective accuracy. Based on our experience in collecting such drawings [1], we will capture the construction sequence of each drawing using a pen tablet, such that each pen stroke is represented by a polyline with pen pressure and a time stamp. We will complement these drawings with CAD programs representing the same shapes.

[1] OpenSketch: A Richly-Annotated Dataset of Product Design Sketches
Yulia Gryaditskaya, Mark Sypesteyn, Jan Willem Hoftijzer, Sylvia Pont, Frédo Durand, Adrien Bousseau
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia Conference Proceedings) 2019

Main activities

Thanks to cloud-based CAD modeling tools, curated datasets of CAD models have been made public. We will select a set of high-quality models from these datasets. We will gather models with a wide range of complexity, as measured by the number and diversity of CAD operations used. We will then hire professional designers to draw these CAD shapes.

Next, we will align the two types of data, such that drawing strokes are put in correspondence with the CAD instructions that generate the same shape parts. Such aligned data will allow us to study how different CAD operations are drawn and serve as a benchmark for algorithm that aims at segmenting and interpreting design drawings.

Finally, we will analyze the collected CAD and drawing sequences to inform the design of sketch-based modeling systems. In particular, we will measure statistics about how frequently different CAD operations and drawing techniques are used, as well as correlations between drawing techniques and CAD operations.

Skills

Experience in implementing 3D user interfaces and/or geometry processing algorithms. 

Benefits package

  • Subsidized meals
  • Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
  • Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
  • Possibility of teleworking and flexible organization of working hours
  • Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
  • Social, cultural and sports events and activities
  • Access to vocational training
  • Contribution to mutual insurance (subject to conditions)

Remuneration

Gross Salary: 2788 € per month