A uniform approach to represent features in different application contexts

A dual description for feature-based modeling is proposed which should be equally efficient for design with feature systems and automatic recognition of instances of standard or user-defined features. This description consists of a primary representation in terms of shape features (neutral description) and a set of viewpoint-dependent feature-based representations (secondary descriptions) which are created by transformations that are viewpoint-specific and which are applied to the shape decomposition model.