Spring-mass model application to engineering NURBS surface reconstruction

In this paper an original application of spring-mass based model to NURBS surface reconstruction from point clouds is described. In last few years spring-mass models have been largely and successfully applied in Computer Animation for cloth simulation, but their application has been limited to non-Engineering fields. Following the physical metaphor of laying a cloth over a non-structured set of spatial points and yielding an optimised collision detection algorithm, a C++ code, named CloSReEng (Cloth Simulation Reverse Engineering) has been developed and tested. During the reconstruction procedure a spring-mass network (NURBS surface where control points have masses self connected with springs) is pushed on point cloud by forces on masses. Once a part of the network gets in contact with a point, the cloth is constrained to this point and the procedure is stopped when the whole network has gained the equilibrium status. Several tests of CloSReEng software have demonstrated the high quality of surface reconstruction (1/1000 error maximum) with acceptable computing time. Thus the proposed method could be considered an interesting alternative to classical techniques.