Data reduction methods for reverse engineering

Reverse engineering is an emerging technology that promises to play a role in reducing product development time. Reverse engineering in this paper refers to the process of creating engineering design data from existing parts. It creates or clones an existing part by acquiring its surface data using a scanning or measurement device. Recently, laser scanning technology has improved significantly and has become a viable option in capturing geometries of complicated design models. 3D laser scanners have become more accurate and the speed of data acquisition has increased dramatically However, they generate up to thousands of points per second, and handling the huge amount of point data is a major problem. It becomes quite important, therefore, to reduce the amount of acquired point data and convert it into formats required by the manufacturing processes while maintaining the accuracy. This paper presents methods that can reduce efficiently the amount of point data.