Shape recovery and viewpoint planning for reverse engineering

In this paper, a new methodology for surface reconstruction from sets of points for reverse engineering is described. The sets of points are obtained using stereovision techniques. Techniques for minimizing the number of images required for a complete object reconstruction are explored based on characterizing the shapes to be recovered in terms of visibility and number and nature of cavities. The ultimate goal of our viewpoint planning technique is to minimize the number of images when no prior information about the objects is available.