Generation of a CAD model from a physical object, which is known as "shape reverse engineering" is an essential process in many industrial applications. Especially, shape reverse engineering(SRE) is becoming more important in rapid product development. A typical SRE process consists of digitization, surface modeling, and CAD-data generation.
Presented in the thesis is an integrated procedure for automating the digitization and surface modeling processes when a coordinate measuring machine(CMM) is employed in SRE. In the proposed procedure, the digitization process and the surface modeling process are integrated so that the physical object is automatically digitized until a surface model of required precision is obtained. First, the boundary of the surface region to be digitized is measured interactively, and then, at each stage of the digitization process, geometrically smooth triangular Bezier patches are automatically constructed while checking deviation errors. The process of digitization and surface modeling is terminated when the deviation errors become smaller than the tolerance requirement. The validity of the proposed approach is demonstrated by implementing a software system consisting of CMM-computer communication modules and surface modeling modules.