Euclidean Symmetry Detection From Scanned Meshes Based on a Combination of ICP and Region Growing Algorithms

Abstract

Recently, meshes of engineering objects have been easily acquired by 3D laser or high-energy industrial X-ray CT scanning systems and they are widely used in product developments. For the effective use of scanned meshes in inspection, re-design, and simulation of the objects, it is important to reconstruct CAD models from the meshes. Engineering objects often exhibit Euclidean symmetries for their functionalities. Therefore, it is essential to detect such symmetries when reconstructing CAD models with compact data representations which are similar to the ones already defined in CAD systems. However, existing methods for reconstructing CAD models have not focused on detecting such symmetries. In this paper, we propose a new method that detects partial or global Euclidean symmetries, including translation, rotation, and reflection, from scanned meshes of engineering objects based on the combination of the ICP and the region growing algorithms. Our method can robustly and efficiently extract pairs of symmetric regions and their transformations under which the pair can be closely matched to each other. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method from experiments on various scanned meshes.

Robust and Exhaustive Method for Symmetry Detection from Scanned Meshes

“…A meaningful symmetry is shown in Figure 8(c). Although our previous method [10] failed to detect symmetries from such feature-less meshes, i.e., few sharp edges and corners, our proposed method overcomes such limitations and can accurately detect symmetries. Since this mock-up is created by a human designer, several distortions are unavoidable.…”

“…In this paper, to overcome the problems faced in our previous work [10], we propose a new method for detecting a common class of symmetries in engineering such as translation, rotation, and planar reflection, from a scanned mesh. Advantages of the new method include:…”

“…is found, they are simultaneously enlarged by our pairwise region growing [10]. In this method, using …”

“…Mizoguchi and Kanai [10] proposed a method for detecting a common class of symmetries in engineering, including translation, rotation and reflection from scanned meshes of mechanical parts. This method first detects the planar regions bounded by high curvature vertices and then tests the congruency of their neighborhoods.…”