Semi‐automatic Modeling of Reverse‐Engineered Shapes through Design‐by‐Feature and Genetic Algorithms

Reverse Engineering aims at constructing CAD models of existing objects starting from measurement data. In the classical approach a reverse engineering procedure completes in three main steps: data acquisition data processing and modeling. Herein we describe a novel semi-automatic approach for integrating CAD and reverse engineering. The basic idea consists in constructing a parametric and feature-based approximate model and matching it with measurement data to determine the unknown parameters. The approach is semi-automatic since part of the model is constructed manually by the user, while the exact values of the parameters are computed through an optimization procedure based on genetic algorithms. Two case studies are presented and critically discussed.