Route planning for irregular measuring area based on polygon approximation

Route planning plays a key role in reverse engineering. Currently, a rectangle is usually taken as the approximation of an irregular measuring area. This would lead to a low efficiency in measuring because unnecessary region is included and blank routes are generated. In this paper, a polygon-based method is presented to more accurately approximate irregular area. An irregular area is decomposed into a set of sub-polygons. Within each sub-polygon, there is no blank route. Unnecessary region is thus much more reduced. Experiment shows that measuring efficiency is improved a great deal by adopting the polygon-based method, compared with the rectangle approximation method.