CAD-driven Pattern Recognition in Reverse Engineered Models

Today, it has become frequent and relatively easy to digitize the surface of 3D objects and then to reconstruct a combination of geometric primitives such as planes, cylinders, spheres or cones. However, the given reconstruction contains only geometry, no information of a semantic nature used during the design process is included. In this paper, we present a robust method to recognize specific geometric structures which are not explicitly present in an object, such as features and repetitions. These are known as patterns, which are used in the CAD modeling process. Moreover, the digitization of an object often leads to various inaccuracies, and therefore inaccurate extracted primitives. We also demonstrate how recognized patterns can be useful as an application in beautification, which consists of the adjustment of primitive parameters to satisfy geometrical relations such as parallelism and concentricity. Our objective is to design a fast and automatic method, which is seldom seen in reverse engineering. We show the efficiency and robustness of our method through experimental results applied on reverse engineered 3D meshes.