Feature-based decomposition of trimmed surface

A trimmed surface is usually represented by a parametric surface and a set of trimming curves. Because of the complexity in manipulating trimmed surfaces, many CAD processes and algorithms cannot be applied to trimmed surfaces directly. It is thus desirable to represent a trimmed surface by a group of regular surfaces. In this paper, an algorithm for decomposing a trimmed surface is presented. First, bisectors of the Voronoi diagram developed in the parametric space are used to define an isolated region for every trimming curve. Feature points on the trimming curves are extracted by considering curvatures of the curves. Correspondence between feature points and vertices on the bisectors are established by considering the similarity between the trimming curves and the bisectors. Regions of parametric patches are then identified. Finally, a group of regular surfaces are constructed by interpolating a set of sampled surface points on each of the identified regions. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.