Reverse engineering of a symmetric object

This paper presents a procedure to find an approximate symmetry plane from a point cloud for the reverse engineering of a symmetric object. Even if, the point cloud acquired from a symmetric object does not have exact symmetry planes in the mathematical sense, the data usually carries adequate symmetric information for reverse engineering. To generate a CAD model satisfying the original aesthetic and functional design, it is essential to extract approximate symmetry planes. This paper proposes a new procedure to extract a symmetry plane, and it includes a registration step, aligning three-dimensional models. To improve the computational efficiency of the proposed procedure, the registration step has been modified by using the inherent attributes of the problem: (1) the measured point data may include noise and (2) the point cloud might be partially asymmetric. The proposed procedure has been implemented and proven to be efficient enough to handle very heavy data sets including millions of entities (points and triangles).