Title: Fragment based Mesh Segmentation for Reverse Engineering

Abstract:
Recently in industry, reverse engineering applications have extended from style design to other design/manufacturing processes where they have faced new requirements. We are interested in reverse engineering of functional parts to generate their standard CAD models to be used for generating FEM meshes. Some typical examples are a cylinder head of an automotive engine and a transmission case. In these applications, high quality (Class-A) surfaces are not usually required, but manual operation must be minimized for shortening the product development time. In my talk, I will introduce our practical development with industry partners aiming at fully automatic reverse engineering system and in particular its core of a heuristic method for segmenting meshes of such functional parts. This method uses region growing based on VSA (Variational Shape Approximation) to first generate many small regions (fragments) which are then merged to form segments for three types of surfaces, primitive surfaces, base surfaces and fillets.