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Computer-Aided Design and Applications (ISSN 1686-4360) is an independent, international peer-reviewed technical journal dedicated to the applications of computer-aided design and manufacturing.
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Volume 5 Numbers 1-4 Pages 86-98
Reverse Engineering Polygonal Meshes Using Discrete Differential Geometry
Gerard O’Driscoll, Vero UK Ltd.
Abstract. Reverse Engineering computer representations of physical objects is still a substantial research topic either it be in the manufacturing industry, virtual reality or computer vision. This paper explains a semi-automatic approach to the conversion of polygonal meshes into standard high-level CAD representations. User intervention is sought only for choosing appropriate tolerance values and fine-tuning the model. The uniqueness of the current approach is its usage of Discrete Differential Geometry. We take regular triangle meshes and compute Discrete Differential Curvature measurements over them. We then sub-divide them into smaller 2D geometric entities and 3D triangular faceted patches that highlight sharp edges and curved surfaces, respectively. The techniques we have implemented automate a substantial part of the structure and topology discovery and we aim for further automation in future. All features described in this paper have been implemented as part of the CAD package VISI®, owned by Vero UK Ltd.
Keywords: reverse engineering, discrete differential geometry, STL, feature extraction.
DOI: 10.3722/cadaps.2008.86-98
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