Particle swarm optimization with local search for height-map surface reconstruction from point clouds in reverse engineering

Abstract Surface reconstruction is a classical process in industrial engineering and manufacturing, particularly in reverse engineering, where the goal is to obtain a digital model from a physical object. For that purpose, the real object is typically scanned or digitized and the resulting point cloud is then fitted to mathematical surfaces through numerical optimization. The choice of the approximating functions is crucial for the accuracy of the process. Real-world objects such as manufactured workpieces often require complex nonlinear approximating functions, which are not well suited for standard numerical methods. In a previous paper presented at the ISMSI 2023 conference, we addressed this issue by using manually selected approximation functions via optimization through the cuckoo search algorithm with Lévy flights. Building upon that work, this paper presents an enhanced and extended method for surface reconstruction by using height-map surfaces obtained through a combination of exponential, polynomial and logarithmic functions. A feasible approach for this goal is to consider continuous bivariate distribution functions, which ensures consistent models along with good mathematical properties for the output shapes, such as smoothness and integrability. However, this approach leads to a difficult multivariate, constrained, multimodal continuous nonlinear optimization problem. To tackle this issue, we apply particle swarm optimization, a popular swarm intelligence technique for continuous optimization. The method is hybridized with a local search procedure for further improvement of the solutions and applied to a benchmark of 15 illustrative examples of point clouds fitted to different surface models. The performance of the method is analyzed through several computational experiments. The numerical and graphical results show that the method is able to recover the shape of the point clouds accurately and automatically. Furthermore, our approach outperforms other alternative methods significantly in terms of the numerical errors. We conclude that our method can be successfully applied to the reconstruction of manufactured workpieces in real industrial settings.