Development of a programme system for data-point pre-processing in Reverse Engineering

Abstract

In the frame of the current extremely demanding market, industry has to respond very fast with new products designed in very short time often in complex-organic shapes. To model this kind of shapes sometimes is very hard or even impossible with standard CAD tools. On that basis technique of Reverse Engineering, as a solution for complex shapes' design, has been developing very fast during the last decade. Even with the fast development over the last few years, Reverse Engineering still has certain drawbacks. One of the main problems is related with the low quality of 3D-digitization result (noise, measurement errors, redundant data, incomplete data, etc.), which implicates in less accurate surface reconstruction. Solving or at least reclamation, of this problem is possible by preparation of the 3D-digitization result through data filtering, data smoothing and data reduction. These steps are, among some others, normally implied in pre-processing phase of Reverse Engineering process. In this paper the programme system for the pre-processing of 3D-digitization data-points has been presented. Proposed system is based on a cross-sectional approach, presently mainly used in industry. The developed solution is verified through practical application and some of experimental results are presented in the paper. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.