Reconstruction of a composite surface by reverse engineering techniques

Abstract

In the reverse engineering area, while the reconstruction of surfaces from scanned or digitised data has been developed, a geometric model of an existing object is often unavailable. This paper presents a new approach to the reconstruction of a surface. The proposed methodology finds the basic parts of the surface and blends surfaces between them. Each basic geometric part is divided into triangular patches which are compared using normal vectors for face grouping. Each group, is categorised into analytical surfaces such as a part of a cylinder; a sphere or a cone, and plane shapes to represent the basic geometric surface. Each basic geometric surface is then implemented to the infinitive surface (unbounded plane, cylinder, cone, or sphere: cylinder, cone, and sphere are full shapes of analytical surfaces). The infinitive surface's intersections are trimmed by boundary representation model reconstruction. The proposed methodology has several advantages such as computational efficiency and automatic functional modelling in reverse engineering. Reverse engineering should be the 3D equipment of the photocopying process.