arXiv · 2606.01891
MidSurfNet: Learning Face Pairing for Mid-surface Abstraction of Thin-walled CAD Models
Abstract
Mid-surface abstraction is an important preprocessing step for finite element analysis of thin-walled CAD models, and face pairing is its central subproblem. Existing face-pairing methods rely on handcrafted geometric criteria whose thresholds are hard to tune when a model has multiple local wall thicknesses; their groupings depend on threshold settings and processing order, so the same model can yield inconsistent results. We present MidSurfNet, a learning-based face-pairing method that couples a learned face-pair scorer with a deterministic face-group composition. The scorer evaluates every unordered face pair with two separately learned evidence streams: a geometry stream combining continuous pairing criteria with a conditional shape correction, and an attributed-topology stream over the B-Rep face-adjacency graph. A pair-conditioned gate fuses the two streams, and independent per-pair decisions retain opposing-face support relations at one operating threshold selected once on validation data, replacing rather than adding to the per-model thresholds of rule-based pipelines. Under a connected-and-bipartite condition, the composition stage organizes the retained relations into variable-cardinality m-to-n face groups, each independent of processing order for a fixed support graph and unique up to its two side labels. We also construct the MidSurf dataset, a benchmark of 1,575 manually annotated CAD models. On the test set, MidSurfNet attains a pair-level F1-Score of 87.32%, 23.22 percentage points above the strongest rule-based baseline, and an end-to-end Completion Rate of 75.42%, including 61.90% on the multi-wall-thickness category the evaluated rule-based implementations do not support. We demonstrate practical utility by generating mid-surfaces from the composed face groups through an industrial mid-surface API and running finite element analyses on the resulting shell models.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Li Ye, Xinhang Zhou, Xingyu Yang, Ruofeng Tong, Hailong Li, Peng Du, Min Tang. 2026-09-03. MidSurfNet: Learning Face Pairing for Mid-surface Abstraction of Thin-walled CAD Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01891
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.
Discover connections
Connections use source metadata and explicit phrase matches, not verified experimental comparisons.