The processing of data points basing on design intent in reverse engineering

The purpose of this paper is to describe an approach to process the data points, measured from existing objects, for feature-curve fitting in reverse engineering. In the field of reverse engineering, the major problem is that the original measured points with irregular format, and unequal distribution, and lack of appropriate segmentation are difficult to fit into a curve in CAD systems. Therefore, the technology of restoring and segmenting data points is greatly needed to construct the model of an existing object. The proposed approach has been developed to process the measured points with designer interaction to segment and regenerate the data points with the format, in which the points meet the requirements fitting into a B-spline curve with good shape and high quality. This approach consists of five steps: (1) sampling data points; (2) regressing the sampled points into an explicit non-parametric equation; (3) filtering the unwanted points with pre-determined tolerance; (4) regressing the residual points; and (5) regenerating data points from the second-time regressed equation. The proposed approach has been implemented by using an example for practical application, and the result proves the viability of the proposed approach integrating with the current commercial CAD systems.