A reverse engineering system for reproducing a 3D human bust

인체 흉상 복제를 위한 역공학 시스템

A dedicated reverse engineering(RE) system for rapid manufacturing of human head in a 3D bust has been developed. The first step in the process is to capture the surface details of a human head and shoulder by three scanners based upon the digital moire fringe technique. Then the multiple scans captured from different angles are aligned and merged into a single polygonal mesh, and the aligned data set is refined by smoothing, subdividing or hole filling process. Finally, the refined data set is sent to a 4-axis computer numerically control(NC) machine to manufacture a replica. In this paper, we mainly describe on the algorithms and software for aligning multiple data sets. The method is based on the recently popular Iterative Closest Point(ICP) algorithm that aligns different polygonal meshes into one common coordinate system. The ICP algorithm finds the nearest positions on one scan to a collection of points on the other scan by minimizing the collective distance between different scans. We also integrate some heuristics into the ICP to enhance the aligning process. A typical example is presented to validate the system and further research work is also discussed.