CAD-driven analysis and beautification of reverse engineered geometric models

Today, it has become more frequent and relatively easy to digitize the surface of 3D objects and then to reconstruct a boundary representation (B-Rep), which is a combination of geometric primitives like planes, cylinders, spheres and cones. However, the obtained results suffer from various inaccuracies, mainly due to noisy data. Moreover, the given reconstruction contains only the geometry, without any information of a semantic nature induced by the design process. In this paper, we present an efficient method to extract absolute references which are not explicitly present in an object, such as the orthogonal coordinate system and alignment planes. These are known as datum references, which are used in the CAD modeling process. Then, we show that datum references can be useful through an application for beautification, which consists in the adjustment of primitive parameters to satisfy relations such as parallelism, orthogonality and concentricity. Our objective is to design a fast and automatic method, which is seldom seen in reverse engineering. We show the efficiency and the robustness of our method through experimental results applied on reverse engineered 3D meshes.