Reverse engineering (RE for short hereafter) is widely used in many areas including engineering design and manufacturing, entertainment industry, medical application, and so on. This thesis is focused on RE for engineering design, especially the rough surfacing process in automobile industry. This thesis presents the overall RE process for automobile design, followed by a step-by-step description of the process. Then the requirement from RE process is compared to the functionality of commercially available RE software (GeoMagic from Raindrop and RapidForm from Inus Technology). The functional gaps are further analyzed to derive key research topics in RE area. Some research directions for the topics are suggested as a conclusion.
