Reverse Engineering Point Clouds to Fit Tensor Product B-Spline Surfaces by Blending Local Fits

Abstract: Being able to reverse engineer from point cloud data to obtain 3D models is important in modeling. As our main contribution, we present a new method to obtain a tensor product B-spline representation from point cloud data by fitting surfaces to appropriately segmented data. By blending multiple local fits our method is more efficient than existing techniques, with the ability to deal with more detail by efficiently introducing a high number of knots. Further point cloud data obtained by digitizing 3D data, typically presents many associated complications like noise and missing data. As our second contribution, we propose an end-to-end framework for smoothing, hole filling, parameterization, knot selection and B-spline fitting that addresses these issues, works robustly with large irregularly shaped data containing holes and is straightforward to implement.