Parametric Curve Reconstruction from Point Clouds using Minimization Techniques

Smooth (C1-, C2-,...) curve reconstruction from noisy point samples is central to reverse engineering, medical imaging, etc -- Unresolved issues in this problem are (1) high computational expenses, (2) presence of artifacts and outlier curls, (3) erratic behavior at self-intersections and sharp corners -- Some of these issues are related to non-Nyquist (i.e. sparse) samples -- Our work reconstructs curves by minimizing the accumulative distance curve cs. point sample -- We address the open issues above by using (a) Principal Component Analysis (PCA) pre-processing to obtain a topologically correct approximation of the sampled curve -- (b) Numerical, instead of algebraic, calculation of roots in point-to-curve distances -- (c) Penalties for curve excursions by using point cloud to - curve and curve to point cloud -- (d) Objective functions which are economic to minimize -- The implemented algorithms successfully deal with self - intersecting and / or non-Nyquist samples -- Ongoing research includes self-tuning of the algorithms and decimation of the point cloud and the control polygon
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