Product design decision-making (PDDM) is a crucial process in new product development (NPD), where achieving consensus among decision-makers (DMs) is essential for optimal outcomes. Within this broader context, product appearance design decision-making (PADDM) plays a particularly important role, as visual appeal, aesthetics, and user perception often significantly influence market success. Traditional consensus reaching processes (CRPs) in PADDM often depend on a single type of social relationship, resulting in the loss of information dimensions and biased decision outcomes. Our method overcomes these limitations by leveraging the complementary strengths of trust and empathy to enhance the robustness and adaptability of the PADDM process. The intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs) are used to depict DMs’ assessments and their mutual trust, while a Likert-7 scale is employed to evaluate the degree of empathy among DMs. Through trust propagation, a complete trust relationship is established, and by integrating the empathy relationship, a composite trust-empathy matrix is formulated. This matrix helps determine DMs’ weights and facilitates the implementation of the CRP in PADDM. An illustrative case study on vibratory rolling mill design selection is presented to illustrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method. Our findings indicate that integrating empathy and trust relationships can effectively address cases where direct or indirect trust paths are missing and stabilize the PADDM process when empathy is weak. This dual-integration approach ensures a more holistic understanding of DM interactions, leading to improved decision quality and reliability in product appearance design scenarios.

Accurate and fast target image recognition is an important function of applications such as remote sensing imaging and medical imaging. However, an operator such as speeded up robust feature (SURF) cannot be accurately matched in the recognition process of a target image. This led us to propose the use of a method capable of matching identification, i.e. binary robust invariant scalable keypoints (BRISK) operators, in combination with SURF operators. The proposed algorithm combines the accuracy of SURF operators and the rapidity of BRISK operators to obtain a quick and accurate way of matching. The initial matching of image feature extraction for targets is performed using the SURF-BRISK algorithm, and similarity measurements of feature matching are performed for the feature points of initial matching using the Hamming distance. Then, secondary fine matching is performed using the M-estimator Sample and Consensus (MSAC) algorithm to eliminate mismatched point pairs in order to achieve recognition of target images. Then, the three-dimensional coordinates of the work piece are obtained by using a binocular stereo vision system to provide location coordinates for the robots to grasp the work pieces accurately. In the experiment, stereo vision matching is conducted for targets obtained using the SURF-BRISK algorithm, and the location coordinates of targets are passed to the robot controller. The experimental results show that if the special geometric distortion is neglected, this method can be adapted for accurate positioning of the target; hence, it can identify the target in complex environments, access the location coordinates of the target, and achieve accurate robotic grasping of the work piece in real time.