Abstract
This paper proposes an approach for computing CAD models of thin-plate industrial structures, from their volume data. As CAD systems use mid-surfaces for modeling thin-plate structures, a mid-surface computation from its CT image is useful in various reverse engineering applications. Conventionally, skeleton definitions are used for approximating mid-surfaces but it is not possible to obtain a precise representation of corresponding shape by using these skeletons. We propose a method which first extracts one such skeleton i.e. medial-surface and then transforms it into the desired mid-surface. Medial surfaces have some undesirable features like extraneous branches, non-linear junctions etc. Our method removes such flaws and obtains a precise mid-surface representation. The proposed method can generate mid-surface automatically and shows effective results on complex industrial models, even including non-manifolds.
