Adaptive Slicing of Moving Least Squares Surfaces: Toward Direct Manufacturing of Point Set Surfaces

Rapid advancement of 3D sensing techniques has lead to dense and accurate point cloud of an object to be readily available. The growing use of such scanned point sets in product design, analysis and manufacturing necessitates research on direct processing of point set surfaces. In this paper, we present an approach that enables the direct layered manufacturing of point set surfaces. This new approach is based on adaptive slicing of moving least squares (MLS) surfaces. Salient features of this new approach include: 1) it bypasses the laborious surface reconstruction and avoids model conversion induced accuracy loss; 2) the resulting layer thickness and layer contours are adaptive to local curvature and thus it leads to better surface quality and more efficient fabrication; 3) the MLS surface naturally smoothes the point cloud and allows up-sampling and down-sampling, and thus it is robust even for noisy or sparse point sets. Experimental results of the slicing algorithm on both synthetic and scanned point sets are presented.