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Doodle Search

Working with support from the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, Imaginestics, a company located in West Lafayette, IN, has created 3D-Seek: 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 advance in practical pattern recognition, all the user needs is a freehand sketch – a doodle.

The Purdue Research Park-based company developed 3D-Seek and its associated catalog mainly for manufacturing firms, which are constantly looking for hinges, bolts, conveyor belts, motors and a host of other products. For those firms, notes 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.

The 3D-Seek software was built on top of technology created by Karthik Ramani and his colleagues at the NSF-supported Purdue Research and Education Center for Information Systems in Engineering (PRECISE) at Purdue University. The public can try the freehand-search online at the 3D-Seek portal at www.3d-seek.com.

“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 3D 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 than those handled by the leading Internet search engines, and yet still finds results quickly.”

The 3D-Seek catalog 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.

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