Sweep Surface Detection from Points Cloud Data using Theory of Kinematic Surfaces and Slippable Motion

One important problem investigated in reverse engineering (RE) field is finding the best surface to approximate point cloud data. Swept surface is a surface type that in addition to various applications in CAD/CAM software, satisfies the whole standards required for use in RE software. The most important problem in utilization of swept surfaces for RE purposes is the finding of the areas belonging to it out of point cloud data. Through an algorithm presented in this paper, a method has been introduced to find these areas automatically. Currently, this process is performed by user intervention. In this paper, using kinematic surface formulation and slippable motion concept, a general method to find swept surfaces with any arbitrary central curve and profile is introduced. To this end, point cloud data are processed regarding slippable motion criterion using iterative segmentation algorithm, then by presenting an effective algorithm and employing the concept of hierarchical classification and drawing the dual graph, swept-surface-related areas are found. The introduced method is implemented in several models with different conditions for validation. It is observed that the results have good agreement with real model condition, showing the efficiency of this method in finding the swept surface.