A Review of Reverse Engineering Technology

This paper reviews the developed process of reverse engineering, after addressing the research aspects of reverse engineering and main application areas, the various 3D data digitized technology and model reconstruction methods are discussed in particular, some other specific issues including reconstruction method by geometry and constraints, integrated reverse engineering system framework and the software used for reverse engineering are described as well. The limitations of existing research and technology are also described, the representive problems are as followes:data acquistion techniques which consider downstream process very few, surface patch fitting used in geometric model reconstruction neglects the constraints relationship and geometric feature of the object. Before reverse engineering is widely used as a available tool, there will be still several problems needed to be solved.