Research on Point Cloud Slicing Technique in Reverse Engineering

Point cloud slicing plays an important role in the field of reverse engineering. By slicing, the scatted data points can be reorganized with layered structure. In this paper, an effective slicing method is proposed. It mainly consists of two steps: slicing data extraction and curve reconstruction. Slicing data can be obtained through intersection of plane and measured points. And the curve of each layer can be created rapidly through a novel hybrid algorithm. In this algorithm, the unordered slicing data points are firstly decomposed into different ρ-connected components based on the density ρ of the point cloud, where the components are regarded as the nodes of undirected graph. Then the curve is reconstructed by solving the traveling salesman problem. The efficacy of the algorithm is demonstrated by case studies.