Surface segmentation and reconstruction in reverse engineering

Abstract

Reverse Engineering (RE) is the process by which the geometry of a physical part is recreated digitally by digitizing and data modification. RE main difficulty is surface reconstruction. This difficulty increases by increasing part complexity. In this research, a developed reverse engineering approach has been adopted to create a 3D CAD model for power stern. The approach begins from the existing and goes through three main steps (scanning, data pre-processing, and part segmentation and surface reconstruction) and finalize to a readable CAD model. A mathematical representation for the NURB curve has been created to formalize the edges of segments then reconstructing plan and tabulated surfaces according to the segment geometry. Algorithms and computer programs using MATLAB programs have been built to implement the proposed approach and save the data.