Geometric modeling from scattered 3-D range data

We propose an algorithm to produce a 3-D CAD model from a set of range data, based on non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS) surface fitting technique. Our goal is to construct continuous geometric models, assuming that the topology of surface is unknown. In our approach, a divide-and-conquer strategy is adopted, in which the whole range data is partitioned into surface patches. Each patch is sequentially processed to form the quadrilateral face model, which is used to construct the NURBS patch network. Experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. It is shown that the continuous 3-D model is successfully generated automatically with tolerable computational complexity.