Reconstruction of free form Surfaces in Reverse Engineering Technology Applications

This paper presents a new experimental approach in reverse engineering for rapid reconstruction, modeling and manufacturing of products with complex free form surfaces. The proposed approach eliminates the requirement for camera calibration and poses estimation. Using planar sectioning, we generate a set of horizontal parallel planes slicing the object to a set of parallel cross-sections. For each object slice, we captured an image using single digital camera. In this paper an image-based slicing technique and system for 3D free form surface reconstruction of a real object is proposed and implemented, the system is relatively low cost and easy to implement. The test object is placed in a cubic container filled with a dark liquid and the intersections between the liquid level and the real object are generated by raising the movable base in step by step manner, and for each step an image has been captured. The depth of each cross section can be directly obtained for each of the captured image. After obtaining all the depth information of the real object, the data have been integrated to reconstruct the 3D free form surface