A rapid reverse engineering system for reproducing 3D human busts

Abstract

The most critical problems in the current reverse engineering (RE) are often related to data registration and hole filling. This is because no single scan image is sufficient to describe the entire object since most objects occlude themselves, and some scanned data is likely to be missing on the object. In this paper, we establish a registration and a hole-filling algorithm to solve this problem. The registration module is based upon the standard Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm with some additional heuristics, which help to overcome the limitation of ICP requiring that one of the data scans must be a subset of the other. The aligned triangle mesh is still unsuitable for model reproduction since it often has missing data. The proposed hole filling algorithm reconstructs these missing data with the iterative manner and these data are then smoothed with their neighboring polygonal meshes. We have developed a dedicated system for reproducing a human head and shoulder by using the implemented polygon-based algorithms. The system quickly reconstructs the surface datails of human busts and produces the replica of 3D human model using 4-axis CNC milling machine. Some typical examples are presented to validate the system and further research work is also discussed.