Reverse Engineering and restyling of aesthetic products based on sketches interpretation

In the conceptual design stage, outcomes of industrial designers work are generally represented by set of sketches where curves, notes, shadows, and colors implicitly represent creative ideas. Signs and annotations are used to synthesize and concretize the design intent that, finally, will be transformed into the styling product visual appearance. The loss of the original design intent may be due to the complexity of the design process, and the involvement of different actors. Our aim is to provide a method and relative tools in order to interpret signs on sketches for eliciting the design intent. The analysis result is a set of aesthetic features that can be used for driving CAD modeling, in the case both of Reverse Engineering applications and of product modeling for restyling purposes. Sketches analysis is based on a semiotic interpretation driven by the formalization of the cognitive models used in the conceptual design phase. The approach showed promising results on different styling products test cases.