New Surface Fitting Approach in Reverse Engineering of Sheet Metal Parts

The paper is focused on surface reconstruction techniques, developed to enhance the capability of a measurement system set up for analysing sheet-metal parts. It presents an alternative technique to get accurate results in shape reconstruction in terms of deviation and smoothing. The matrix-like structured data, output of the measure, allows to reconstruct the surfaces following two approaches: Fit curves to sets of aligned points and then blend a surface onto them; fit surfaces on the whole point data set. The first approach is easier to perform because of the wide diffusion, also in the CAD systems, of many robust routines for 2D-curve fitting. The second approach requires a more complex algorithm to surface the 3D point cloud directly but allows to take into account a smoothing factor on the whole data set, that is very useful when more noise is expected on the point cloud.