Converting Point Cloud to Revolved Solids
3D scanning is one of the basic methods to gather data for reverse engineering. The main drawback of 3D scanning is that its output - the point cloud - can never be used directly to define surfaces or solids useful to reconstruct the electronic 3D model of the scanned part.The paper presents a piece of software designed in VisualLISP for AutoCAD, software that acts as a point cloud to 3D primitives converter. The novelty consists of the method used to find the parameters of the primitive that best fits to the point cloud: the mass properties of regions are used to find the center of a cones cross section. Parts have been scanned and the point clouds processed. The results obtained prove the correctness of the algorithm and of the method applied. A piece of software that processes the point cloud in order to find the 3D primitive that it fits the best has been developed. The output is the 3D primitive that successfully and accurate replaces the point cloud. Some adjacent tools were designed, so the entire software package becomes a useful tool for the reverse engineering user. The ways the researches can be continued and developed are foreseen, as well