Development of solid modeler: a review on the representation and 3D reconstruction

Abstract

Originally, technical drawings were made by hand using technical drawing board. The rise of advanced computer graphics leads to the replacement of drawing board by solid modeler software. The development of three-dimensional (3D) solid modeler involves visualization technology for the viewing and manipulation of 3D models, sources of images, techniques for 3D representations and reconstruction, point set and operations. This paper focuses on the discussion of representation and 3D reconstruction. Few techniques for representations and D reconstruction have been introduced by some researchers which are related to mathematical modeling and artificial intelligence (AI) approach. They are constructive solid geometry, boundary representation, spatial decomposition, simple affine transformation and others which are used for representation. Meanwhile line labeling, gradient space, linear system, interactive method, analytical heuristic, back propagation algorithm for function approximation, genetic algorithm approach and others are used for 3D reconstruction. Discussion on these issues leads to the conclusion that there are only a few researches done on the representation and D reconstruction that deployed AI techniques in the solid modeler engine. Therefore, this paper proposed a review on the development of solid modeler based on the representation and 3D reconstruction.