A hybrid surfacing methodology for reverse engineering

The aim of this paper is to propose a new hybrid surfacing methodology which could result in a faster high-quality surface reconstruction. After reviewing the state-of-the-art reverse modelling techniques, the two methodologies of classic surfacing based on typical procedure of point-curve-surface and rapid surfacing based on polygonised mesh grids are presented. The fundamentals involved in these two methodologies are analysed. Then a new hybrid surfacing methodology based on feature template is proposed. As for hybrid surfacing, rapid surfacing is used firstly to polygonise the point cloud to extract the feature template with quadrilateral parameterisation type, then the feature template is given further treatment in the classic surfacing system to construct the surface model. It can not only efficiently overcome the drawback of curvature continuity in rapid surfacing, but also reduce the difficulty of data segmentation in classic surfacing, making faster high-quality surface approximation possible.