A feature based approach to re-engineering objects of freeform design by exploiting point cloud morphology

Reverse engineering, the process of obtaining a geometric CAD model from measurements obtained by scanning an existing physical model, is widely used in numerous applications, such as manufacturing, industrial design and jewellery design. In this work we propose a framework for reverse engineering objects of freeform design to obtain a fully editable feature-based CAD model that can be reproduced or modified before production. We focus on the process of detecting features on a cloud point and we present a fast method for analyzing the morphology of the surface defined by the point cloud. We compute a point wise characteristic called point concavity intensity and we use this quantity to detect regions that are then refined to object features. The proposed algorithm takes overall O(nlogn) time, where n is the cardinality of the point cloud.