CAD mesh models segmentation into swept surfaces

Abstract

One of the most significant issues investigated in reverse engineering (RE) is the problem of finding the best surface that approximates point cloud data. In recent years, some studies have been carried out for the segmentation of industrial mesh models into primitive surfaces and simple kinematic surfaces such as revolved and extruded surfaces. But, with regard to the swept surfaces that are widely used in CAD models, most researches just investigated how to extract the generative curves and few researches investigated the segmentation of CAD model into swept surfaces. In this paper, regarding the importance of swept surfaces in the fields of computer design, RE, and tool path planning in CAM software, a method to find the swept surfaces by arbitrary central and profile curves is introduced. To this end, with the help of variational segmentation algorithm, and regarding slippable motion as a segmentation criterion, data points are segmented into regions that could be approximated by extruded surface. Then, an effective algorithm is proposed through which, by employing the concept of hierarchical classification and defining the dual graph of the segmented subregions, swept surface regions may be found. The introduced method is capable of recognizing other surfaces such as blend, extruded and revolved surfaces as well. To validate the proposed algorithm, it is implemented in several models with different conditions and various noise levels. It is observed that the results have good agreement with real model condition, which shows the efficiency of this method in finding the swept surface.