Topology reconstruction for B-Rep modeling from 3D mesh in reverse engineering applications

Abstract

Nowadays, most of the manufactured objects are designed using CAD (Computer-Aided Design) software. Nevertheless, for visualization, data exchange or manufacturing applications, the geometric model has to be discretized into a 3D mesh composed of a finite number of vertices and edges. But, in some cases, the initial model may be lost or unavailable. In other cases, the 3D discrete representation may be modified, for example after a numerical simulation, and does not correspond anymore to the initial model. A reverse engineering method is then required to reconstruct a 3D continuous representation from the discrete one. In previous work, we have presented a new approach for 3D geometric primitive extraction. In this paper, to complete our automatic and comprehensive reverse engineering process, we propose a method to construct the topology of the retrieved object. To reconstruct a B-Rep model, a new formalism is now introduced to define the adjacency relations. Then a new process is used to construct the boundaries of the object. The whole process is tested on 3D industrial meshes and bring a solution to recover B-Rep models.