A comprehensive process of reverse engineering from 3D meshes to CAD models

In an industrial context, most manufactured objects are designed using CAD (Computer-Aided Design) software. For visualization, data exchange or manufacturing applications, the geometric model has to be discretized into a 3D mesh composed of a finite number of vertices and edges. However, the initial model may sometimes be lost or unavailable. In other cases, the 3D discrete representation may be modified, e.g. after numerical simulation, and no longer corresponds to the initial model. A retro-engineering method is then required to reconstruct a 3D continuous representation from the discrete one. In this paper, we present an automatic and comprehensive retro-engineering process dedicated mainly to 3D meshes obtained initially by mechanical object discretization. First, several improvements in automatic detection of geometric primitives from a 3D mesh are presented. Then a new formalism is introduced to define the topology of the object and compute the intersections between primitives. The proposed method is validated on 3D industrial meshes. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.