Autonomous measurement of physical model shape for reverse engineering

This paper describes a system to autonomously measure the shape of an unknown physical object for constructing the computer model of a physical object. The system is composed of two subsystems: one is for the rough recognition of a physical object and the other is for the precise measurement. A physical object is roughly recognized as the Z-map model that is constructed by analyzing and processing the shadow images of an object obtained by CCD cameras. The precise measurement of discrete points on the object is autonomously made according to the Z-map model using a three-coordinate measuring machine.