Adaptive Slicing of Moving Least Squares Surfaces: Toward Direct Manufacturing of Point Set Surfaces

Rapid advancement of 3D sensing techniques has led to dense and accurate point cloud of an object to be readily available. The growing use of such scanned point sets in product design, analysis, and manufacturing necessitates research on direct processing of point set surfaces. In this paper, we present an approach that enables the direct layered manufacturing of point set surfaces. This new approach is based on adaptive slicing of moving least squares (MLS) surfaces. Salient features of this new approach include the following: (1) It bypasses the laborious surface reconstruction and avoids model conversion induced accuracy loss. (2) The resulting layer thickness and layer contours are adaptive to local curvatures, and thus it leads to better surface quality and more efficient fabrication. (3) The curvatures are computed from a set of closed formula based on the MLS surface. The MLS surface naturally smoothes the point cloud and allows upsampling and downsampling, and thus it is robust even for noisy or sparse point sets. Experimental results on both synthetic and scanned point sets are presented. DOI: 10.1115/1.2955481