The reverse engineering applications has gained great momentum in industrial production with developments in the fields of computer vision and computer-aided design (CAD). The reproduction of an existing product or a spare part, reproduction of an existing surface, elimination of the defect or improvement of the available product are the goals of industrial reverse engineering applications. The first and the most important step in reverse engineering applications is the generation of the three dimensional (3D) metric model of an existing product in computer environment. After this stage, many operations such as the preparation of molds for mass production, the performance testing, the comparison of the existing product with other products and prototypes which are available on the market are performed by using the generated 3D models. In reverse engineering applications, the laser scanner system or digital terrestrial photogrammetry methods, also called contactless method, are preferred for the generation of the 3D models. In particular, terrestrial photogrammetry has become a popular method since require only photographs for the 3-dimensional drawing, the generation of the dense point cloud using the image matching algorithms and the orthoimage generation as well as its low cost. In this paper, an industrial application of 3D information modelling is presented which concerns the measurement and 3D metric modelling of the ship model. The possible usage of terrestrial photogrammetry in reverse engineering application is investigated based on low cost photogrammetric system. The main aim was the generation of the dense point cloud and 3D line drawing of the ship model by using terrestrial photogrammetry, for the production of the ship in real size as a reverse engineering application. For this purpose, the images were recorded with digital SLR camera and orientations have been performed. Then 3D line drawing operations, point cloud and orthoimage generations have been accomplished by using PhotoModeler software. As a result of the proposed terrestrial photogrammetric steps, 0.5 mm spaced dense point cloud and orthoimage have been generated. The obtained results from experimental study were discussed and possible use of proposed methods was evaluated for reverse engineering application.
High-accuracy 3D shape measurement of translucent objects by fringe projection profilometry