Reverse engineering for rapid prototyping of 3D compound surfaces using edge detection and delaunay triangulation method

The objective of this research is to develop an efficient reverse engineering method of 3-dimensional compound surfaces for rapid prototyping processes. As a first step, the image-processing techniques were applied to scanned data obtained using a laser scanner for edge detection. Based on the detected edges, the boundary information of the compound surface was extracted in order to divide the surface into several separate regions. As a next step, the Delaunay triangulation method was applied in order to independently reconstruct the surface on the basis of the scanned data and the boundary information. Finally, STL files were created for the rapid prototyping process. Required simulations and experiments were performed and the results were analyzed to show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.