Extracting surface patches from complete range descriptions

Constructing a full CAD model of a part requires feature descriptions from all sides; in this case we consider surface patches as the geometric primitives. Most previous research in surface patch extraction has concentrated on extracting patches from a single view. This leads to several problems with aligning and combining partial patch fragments in order to produce complete part models. We have avoided these problems by adapting our single view, range data segmentation program to extract patches, and thus models, directly from fully merged range datasets.