Surface Reconstruction from Unorganized 3D Point Clouds

Computer-based surfacemodels are indispensable in several fields of science and engineering. For example, the design and manufacturing of vehicles, such as cars and aircrafts, would not be possible without sophisticated CAD and simulation tools predicting the behavior of the product. On the other hand, designers often do not like working on virtual models, though sophisticated tools, like immersive VR-environments are available. Hence, a designer may produce a physical prototype made from materials of his choice that can be easily assembled and shaped like clay models. Reverse engineering is the process of reconstructing digital representations from physical models. The overall reverse-engineering framework mainly is composed of four steps (see Figure 1): data acquisition, pre-processing, surface reconstruction, and post-processing;