Fast reconstruction of 3D mechanical parts from 2D orthographic views with rules

Abstract

Abstract. A fast algorithm for 3D part reconstruction from a 3-view drawing is presented. A set of rules are specified to facilitate the part reconstruction. The main idea is to use the rules to determine the truth or falsity of 3D faces and the coexistence or non-coexistence relationships between 3D faces. In a graph search formulation of the reconstruction problem, these rules can reduce remarkably (a) the graph search space, (b) the occurrence of backtracking in the search and (c) the branching factor of the tree expansion. We shall present our method with illustrations. Currently we limit the type of part to be planefaced for presentation simplicity, although we are extending our method to cover the cylindrical parts, too. Experimental results indicate the set of rules is useful and our reconstruction method is very effective.