A Review on Shape Engineering and Design Parameterization in Reverse Engineering

3D scanning technology has made enormous progress in the past 25 years (Blais, 2004); especially, the non-contact optical surface digitizers. These scanners or digitizers become more portable, affordable; and yet capturing points faster and more accurately. A hand-held laser scanner captures tens of thousands points per second with a level of accuracy around 40 m, and can cost as low as fifty thousand dollars, such as ZScanner 800 (ZCorp). Such technical advancement makes the scanners become largely accepted and widely used in industry and academia for a broad range of engineering assignments. As a result, demand on geometric modeling technology and software tools that support efficiently processing large amount of data points (scattered points acquired from a 3D scanning, also called point cloud) and converting them into useful forms, such as NURB (non-uniform rational Bspline) surfaces, become increasingly higher.