Friday, July 27, 2012

TABLE MODELLING

Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T)

Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) is a system for defining and communicating engineering tolerances. It uses a symbolic language on engineering drawings and computer-generated three-dimensional solid models for explicitly describing nominal geometry and its allowable variation. It tells the manufacturing staff and machines what degree of accuracy and precision is needed on each facet of the part. Overview Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) is used to define the nominal (theoretically perfect) geometry of parts and assemblies, to define the allowable variation in form and possible size of individual features, and to define the allowable variation between features. Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing specifications are used as follows: • Dimensioning specifications define the nominal, as-modeled or as-intended geometry. One example is a basic dimension. • Tolerancing specifications define the allowable variation for the form and possibly the size of individual features, and the allowable variation in orientation and location between features. Two examples are linear dimensions and feature control frames using a datum reference (both shown above). There are several standards available worldwide that describe the symbols and define the rules used in GD&T. One such standard is American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Y14.5-2009. This article is based on that standard, but other standards, such as those from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), may vary slightly. The Y14.5 standard has the advantage of providing a fairly complete set of standards for GD&T in one document. The ISO standards, in comparison, typically only address a single topic at a time. There are separate standards that provide the details for each of the major symbols and topics below (e.g. position, flatness, profile, etc.). [edit] Dimensioning and tolerancing philosophy According to the ASME Y14.5-2009[1] standard, the purpose of geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) is to describe the engineering intent of parts and assemblies. This is not a completely correct explanation of the purpose of GD&T or dimensioning and tolerancing in general. The purpose of GD&T is more accurately defined as describing the geometric requirements for part and assembly geometry. Proper application of GD&T will ensure that the allowable part and assembly geometry defined on the drawing leads to parts that have the desired form and fit (within limits) and function as intended. There are some fundamental rules that need to be applied (these can be found on page 6 of the 2009 edition of the standard): • All dimensions must have a tolerance. Every feature on every manufactured part is subject to variation, therefore, the limits of allowable variation must be specified. Plus and minus tolerances may be applied directly to dimensions or applied from a general tolerance block or general note. For basic dimensions, geometric tolerances are indirectly applied in a related Feature Control Frame. The only exceptions are for dimensions marked as minimum, maximum, stock or reference. • Dimensioning and tolerancing shall completely define the nominal geometry and allowable variation. Measurement and scaling of the drawing is not allowed except in certain cases. • Engineering drawings define the requirements of finished (complete) parts. Every dimension and tolerance required to define the finished part shall be shown on the drawing. If additional dimensions would be helpful, but are not required, they may be marked as reference. • Dimensions should be applied to features and arranged in such a way as to represent the function of the features. • Descriptions of manufacturing methods should be avoided. The geometry should be described without explicitly defining the method of manufacture. • If certain sizes are required during manufacturing but are not required in the final geometry (due to shrinkage or other causes) they should be marked as non-mandatory. • All dimensioning and tolerancing should be arranged for maximum readability and should be applied to visible lines in true profiles. • When geometry is normally controlled by gage sizes or by code (e.g. stock materials), the dimension(s) shall be included with the gage or code number in parentheses following or below the dimension. • Angles of 90° are assumed when lines (including center lines) are shown at right angles, but no angular dimension is explicitly shown. (This also applies to other orthogonal angles of 0°, 180°, 270°, etc.) • Dimensions and tolerances are valid at 20 °C / 101.3 kPa unless stated otherwise. • Unless explicitly stated, all dimensions and tolerances are only valid when the item is in a free state. • Dimensions and tolerances apply to the full length, width, and depth of a feature including form variation. • Dimensions and tolerances only apply at the level of the drawing where they are specified. It is not mandatory that they apply at other drawing levels, unless the specifications are repeated on the higher level drawing(s). (Note: The rules above are not the exact rules stated in the ASME Y14.5-2009 standard.)

DESK MODELING

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

ISO DIS 13567 - The Proposed International Standard for Structuring Layers in Computer Aided Building Design

SUMMARY: Layering is a widely used method for structuring data in CAD-models. During the last few years national standardisation organisations, professional associations, user groups for particular CAD-systems, individual companies etc. have issued numerous standards and guidelines for the naming and structuring of layers in building design. In order to increase the integration of CAD data in the industry as a whole ISO recently decided to define an international standard for layer usage. The resulting standard proposal, ISO 13567, is a rather complex framework standard which strives to be more of a union than the least common denominator of the capabilities of existing guidelines. A number of principles have been followed in the design of the proposal. The first one is the separation of the conceptual organisation of information (semantics) from the way this information is coded (syntax). The second one is orthogonality - the fact that many ways of classifying information are independent of each other and can be applied in combinations. The third overriding principle is the reuse of existing national or international standards whenever appropriate. The fourth principle allows users to apply well-defined subsets of the overall superset of possible layernames. This article describes the semantic organisation of the standard proposal as well as its default syntax. Important information categories deal with the party responsible for the information, the type of building element shown, whether a layer contains the direct graphical description of a building part or additional information needed in an output drawing etc. Non-mandatory information categories facilitate the structuring of information in rebuilding projects, use of layers for spatial grouping in large multi-storey projects, and storing multiple representations intended for different drawing scales in the same model. Pilot testing of ISO 13567 is currently being carried out in a number of countries which have been involved in the definition of the standard. In the article two implementations, which have been carried out independently in Sweden and Finland, are described. The article concludes with a discussion of the benefits and possible drawbacks of the standard. Incremental development within the industry, (where ”best practice” can become ”common practice” via a standard such as ISO 13567), is contrasted with the more idealistic scenario of building product models. The relationship between CAD-layering, document management product modelling and building element classification is also discussed. KEYWORDS: CAD-system, layering, standardisation

Drawing Sketsa "HUB"

Drawing Sketsa "HUB"
Drawing work Sketsa "HUB"

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Image Compression and Coding - Fundamentals of visual data compression

Definition: Image compression deals with reducing the amount of data required to represent a digital image by removing of redundant data. Images can be represented in digital format in many ways. Encoding the contents of a 2-D image in a raw bitmap (raster) format is usually not economical and may result in very large files. Since raw image representations usually require a large amount of storage space (and proportionally long transmission times in the case of file uploads/ downloads), most image file formats employ some type of compression. The need to save storage space and shorten transmission time, as well as the human visual system tolerance to a modest amount of loss, have been the driving factors behind image compression techniques. Compression methods can be lossy, when a tolerable degree of deterioration in the visual quality of the resulting image is acceptable, or lossless, when the image is encoded in its full quality. The overall results of the compression process, both in terms of storage savings – usually expressed numerically in terms of compression ratio (CR) or bits per pixel (bpp) – as well as resulting quality loss (for the case of lossy techniques) may vary depending on the technique, format, options (such as the quality setting for JPEG), and the image contents. As a general guideline, lossy compression should be used for general purpose photographic images, whereas lossless compression should be preferred when dealing with line art, technical drawings, cartoons, etc. or images in which no loss of detail may be tolerable (most notably, space images and medical images). We will review the most important concepts behind image compression and coding techniques and survey some of the most popular algorithms and standards. Fundamentals of visual data compression The general problem of image compression is to reduce the amount of data required to represent a digital image or video and the underlying basis of the reduction process is the removal of redundant data. Mathematically, visual data compression typically involves transforming (encoding) a 2-D pixel array into a statistically uncorrelated data set. This transformation is applied prior to storage or transmission. At some later time, the compressed image is decompressed to reconstruct the original image information (preserving or lossless techniques) or an approximation of it (lossy techniques). Redundancy Data compression is the process of reducing the amount of data required to represent a given quantity of information. Different amounts of data might be used to communicate the same amount of information. If the same information can be represented using different amounts of data, it is reasonable to believe that the representation that requires more data contains what is technically called data redundancy. Image compression and coding techniques explore three types of redundancies: coding redundancy, interpixel (spatial) redundancy, and psychovisual redundancy. The way each of them is explored is briefly described below. •Coding redundancy: consists in using variable-length codewords selected as to match the statistics of the original source, in this case, the image itself or a processed version of its pixel values. This type of coding is always reversible and usually implemented using look-up tables (LUTs). Examples of image coding schemes that explore coding redundancy are the Huffman codes and the arithmetic coding technique. •Interpixel redundancy: this type of redundancy – sometimes called spatial redundancy, interframe redundancy, or geometric redundancy – exploits the fact that an image very often contains strongly correlated pixels, in other words, large regions whose pixel values are the same or almost the same. This redundancy can be explored in several ways, one of which is by predicting a pixel value based on the values of its neighboring pixels. In order to do so, the original 2-D array of pixels is usually mapped into a different format, e.g., an array of differences between adjacent pixels. If the original image pixels can be reconstructed from the transformed data set the mapping is said to be reversible. Examples of compression techniques that explore the interpixel redundancy include: Constant Area Coding (CAC), (1-D or 2-D) Run-Length Encoding (RLE) techniques, and many predictive coding algorithms such as Differential Pulse Code Modulation (DPCM). •Psychovisual redundancy: many experiments on the psychophysical aspects of human vision have proven that the human eye does not respond with equal sensitivity to all incoming visual information; some pieces of information are more important than others. The knowledge of which particular types of information are more or less relevant to the final human user have led to image and video compression techniques that aim at eliminating or reducing any amount of data that is psychovisually redundant. The end result of applying these techniques is a compressed image file, whose size and quality are smaller than the original information, but whose resulting quality is still acceptable for the application at hand. The loss of quality that ensues as a byproduct of such techniques is frequently called quantization, as to indicate that a wider range of input values is normally mapped into a narrower range of output values thorough an irreversible process. In order to establish the nature and extent of information loss, different fidelity criteria (some objective such as root mean square (RMS) error, some subjective, such as pairwise comparison of two images encoded with different quality settings) can be used. Most of the image coding algorithms in use today exploit this type of redundancy, such as the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)-based algorithm at the heart of the JPEG encoding standard. Image compression and coding models Figure 1 shows a general image compression model. It consists of a source encoder, a channel encoder, the storage or transmission media (also referred to as channel ), a channel decoder, and a source decoder. The source encoder reduces or eliminates any redundancies in the input image, which usually leads to bit savings. Source encoding techniques are the primary focus of this discussion. The channel encoder increase noise immunity of source encoder’s output, usually adding extra bits to achieve its goals. If the channel is noise-free, the channel encoder and decoder may be omitted. At the receiver’s side, the channel and source decoder perform the opposite functions and ultimately recover (an approximation of) the original image. Figure 2 shows the source encoder in further detail. Its main components are: •Mapper: transforms the input data into a (usually nonvisual) format designed to reduce interpixel redundancies in the input image. This operation is generally reversible and may or may not directly reduce the amount of data required to represent the image. •Quantizer: reduces the accuracy of the mapper’s output in accordance with some pre-established fidelity criterion. Reduces the psychovisual redundancies of the input image. This operation is not reversible and must be omitted if lossless compression is desired. •Symbol (entropy) encoder: creates a fixed- or variable-length code to represent the quantizer’s output and maps the output in accordance with the code. In most cases, a variable-length code is used. This operation is reversible. Error-free compression Error-free compression techniques usually rely on entropy-based encoding algorithms. The concept of entropy is mathematically described in equation (1): where: a j is a symbol produced by the information source P ( a j ) is the probability of that symbol J is the total number of different symbols H ( z ) is the entropy of the source. The concept of entropy provides an upper bound on how much compression can be achieved, given the probability distribution of the source. In other words, it establishes a theoretical limit on the amount of lossless compression that can be achieved using entropy encoding techniques alone. Variable Length Coding (VLC) Most entropy-based encoding techniques rely on assigning variable-length codewords to each symbol, whereas the most likely symbols are assigned shorter codewords. In the case of image coding, the symbols may be raw pixel values or the numerical values obtained at the output of the mapper stage (e.g., differences between consecutive pixels, run-lengths, etc.). The most popular entropy-based encoding technique is the Huffman code. It provides the least amount of information units (bits) per source symbol. It is described in more detail in a separate short article. Run-length encoding (RLE) RLE is one of the simplest data compression techniques. It consists of replacing a sequence (run) of identical symbols by a pair containing the symbol and the run length. It is used as the primary compression technique in the 1-D CCITT Group 3 fax standard and in conjunction with other techniques in the JPEG image compression standard (described in a separate short article). Differential coding Differential coding techniques explore the interpixel redundancy in digital images. The basic idea consists of applying a simple difference operator to neighboring pixels to calculate a difference image, whose values are likely to follow within a much narrower range than the original gray-level range. As a consequence of this narrower distribution – and consequently reduced entropy – Huffman coding or other VLC schemes will produce shorter codewords for the difference image. Read more: Image Compression and Coding - Fundamentals of visual data compression, Redundancy, models, Error-free compression, Variable Length Coding (VLC) - JRank Articles http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/6760/Image-Compression-and-Coding.html#ixzz21Jsy7h8n