One of the truisms of ship design is that the decisions of greatest impact are made in the early stages of design when the least information and the greatest uncertainty are present. In response to this, ongoing efforts in developing ship design tools are directed toward making more information available sooner and pushing decision points later. The integrated nature of electric ship in which performance of support systems directly affects performance of primary mission systems compounds this concern; design and simulation of support systems are needed earlier, and collaborative design among multiple engineering disciplines is required in the process. This paper reviews the Navy ship design process and recent developments in ship design tools to illuminate the areas in which further development is necessary.

We present a system for the automatic global registration of voxelized data using the wavelet transform. The huge size of current data sets makes such multi-resolution techniques appealing; however, the traditional discrete wavelet transform has the drawback of variance with translation and rotation. We employ the dual-tree complex wavelet transform (Kingsbury, 2003), which carefully adds near invariance to translation and reduced sensitivity to rotation in computationally efficient ways, thus enabling the object matching application. We employ the wavelet transform to accomplish registration by extracting features in a multi-resolutional format, thus rapidly detecting and matching feature points. The method is robust to occlusion, clutter and noise. The efficacy of the algorithm is demonstrated through examples from solid modeling and biomedical applications.