Selective data acquisition for direct integration of reverse engineering and rapid prototyping

Reverse engineering (RE) has been used closely with rapid prototyping (RP) for fabricating one object from another. Existing RE-RP integrations all begin with the data acquisition of the entire surface of an object. This large point cloud data contains redundancy that must be reduced to avoid unnecessary difficulty in a subsequent surface reconstruction step. Presented in this paper is an alternative approach for direct RE-RPintegration. Rather than performing data reduction after capturing the data of an entire object, data are acquired selectively and locally layer by layer. An image-processing algorithm has been developed for recommending the scanning positions based on the part complexity to minimise the number of scans. The result of each scan is contour data points, which can be directly used to generate commands for fabricating a prototype. The implementation of this selective data acquisition approach with a non-contact measuring device is also presented and discussed.