A geometric data acquisition system developed for 3 dimensional objects has been further improved by compensating the data near and at the apex not obtainable in the earlier system. To make this possible, the object is tilted to certain degree and the resulting data set is suitably transformed to match the original geometry of non-tilted data.
Four stages of data acquisition and manipulations are necessary and programmed: Data Acquisition, Data Matching, Intersection and Remeshing, and Shape Averaging. In the data acquisition stage, untilted and tilted data are obtaind separately and tilting angle is taken from the experimental set-up. In the data matching stage, the two data are matched by using geometric properties and minimizing an error defined for this purpose. In the next stage, from the matched data, the missing apex data are filled in and the better of the two existing data for the remaining part are selected. The resulting data are rearrange or remeshed to make them suitable for surface representations. In the last stage, a method of shape averging is introduced to facilitate a new shape synthesis.
Several objects such as sphere, light bulb, and sculptured surface model have been tested to show the performance of the algorithms proposed. Although the errors involved are highly dependent on the way of shape matching, they are mainly caused by limitations in the hardware of the image capture system.
