B-spline surface reconstruction and direct slicing from point clouds

The issue of surface reconstruction and slicing from point clouds has been receiving extensive attention recently. When using the B-spline surface fitting technique, the difficulty of parameterization exists. At the same time, for interfacing between reverse engineering and rapid prototyping, the point clouds are usually converted to an stereolithography (STL) model. This leads to a huge file size and requires expert modeling skills. The objective of this work is to establish a base surface parameterization and direct slicing strategy for scattered data based on a cross-sectional design technique. We first present a new method of directly extracting sectional contours from point clouds. Then, we create a base surface by skinning the primary boundary curves and interior sectional curves. Based on a good parameterization, the final surface is achieved with tight tolerance. Several practical examples have demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed method. It can be widely used in Number Control (NC) machining and rapid prototyping.