Geometric Modeling Using Point Clouds

Abstract

Chapter 7 discussed the modeling of surfaces with regard to designing solid shapes as a collection of closed, simply connected surface patches. When designing products with free form shapes such as the aircraft wings and fuselage, car body and its doors, seats and windshields, the shape information has to be acquired as a set of data points and then the surface patches have to be designed from the same. Data points can either be user-specified for an entirely new design or can result as a large discrete set called point cloud from say laser scanning of an existing product or its prototype. Reverse engineering alludes to constructing surface patches from the point cloud data. This chapter describes some methods on point cloud acquisition and surface/solid modeling using the acquired data.