Extraction of Rotational Surfaces and Generalized Cylinders from Point-Clouds Using Section Curves

Abstract

In industrial facilities, there are various types of equipment composed of surfaces that have a high degree of freedom. Rotational surfaces and generalized cylinders are often used for equipment handling liquids and gases. In this paper, we propose methods for reconstructing rotational surfaces and generalized cylinders from noisy and incomplete point-clouds captured by a terrestrial laser scanner. In our method, we convert point-clouds into wireframe models and calculate the intersection points with section planes. Then, we extract ellipses from the intersection points on each section plane and reconstruct the rotational surfaces and generalized cylinders using the extracted ellipses. We also propose a method for subdividing a rotational surface into primitive surfaces. We evaluated our method using actual point-clouds of engineering facilities and confirmed that our method could successfully reconstruct rotational surfaces and generalized cylinders.