Repairing triangular meshes for reverse engineering applications

When an object is digitized and represented in a triangular model, erroneous facets may exist and affect the accuracy of the downstream data analysis algorithms. We here propose an approach to detect and eliminate erroneous facets that might exist in a triangular model. Five types of erroneous facets are identified in this study: degenerate, non-manifold vertices, self-intersection, incomplete connection and inconsistent plane normal. Of these erroneous facets, the first two types must be processed first since they are correlated to the other three types of errors. An individual algorithm is proposed for each type of the errors, and an integrated procedure is then proposed to detect and eliminate all errors automatically. Finally, several examples are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.