A volumetric approach for STL generation from 3D scanned products

Reverse engineering and rapid prototyping are competitive tools for quick distributed product design and enhancement. The possibility to send data over the Internet for the reproduction of physical prototypes in different geographic locations is very attractive, especially in the context of globalization and distributed manufacturing. Currently, the most immediate link between these technologies is the solid to layer (STL) tessellation file that has become one of the industrial standard exchange formats. As a consequence the creation of robust STL files is a crucial task both for direct rapid prototyping purposes and data exchange purposes. Several methodologies have been developed to perform mesh construction, starting from point clouds. In this paper, an efficient volumetric method based on voxelization is presented and validated with several case studies. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.