3D reconstruction of solid models from engineering orthographic views using variational geometry and composite graphs

Reconstruction of 3D solid models from 2D orthographic views is a topic that has received much attention in the last two decades. The 2D orthographic views in this work are engineering drawings and the proposed automatic procedure for 3D object reconstruction mimics skilled human intelligence. This is achieved by combining elements of knowledge retrieval, variational geometry, and graph theoretic methods. In particular, the main novelty in the approach is its use of understanding the nature of 2D engineering drawings. This understanding is translated into an actual algorithm by means of topological relations and dimensional scheme analysis, i.e. variational geometry, for each 2D view. The first step is creating minimal graphs representation for the dimensioning schemes of each view. These local graphs are then merged into a global dimensioning scheme of the entire object. The last step of the process is a transformation of the data from the global graphs to 3D solid models.