A Modified SOFM Segmentation Method in Reverse Engineering

The purpose of reverse engineering is to convert a large point cloud into a CAD model. In reverse engineering, the key issue is segmentation, i.e. studying how to subdivide the point cloud into smaller regions, where each of them can be approximated by a single surface. Segmentation is relatively simple, if regions are bounded by sharp edges and small blends; problems arise when smoothly connected regions need to be separated. In this paper, a modified self- organizing feature map neural network (SOFM) is used to solve segmentation problem. Eight dimensional feature vectors (3-dimensional coordinates, 3- dimensional normal vectors, Gaussian curvature and mean curvature) are taken as input for SOFM. The weighted Euclidean distance measure is used to improve segmentation result. The method not only can deal with regions bounded by sharp edges, but also is very efficient to separating smoothly connected regions. The segmentation method using SOFM is robust to noise, and it operates directly on the point cloud. An example is given to show the effect of SOFM algorithm.