Cuckoo Search Algorithm with Lévy Flights for Surface Reconstruction from Point Clouds with Applications to Reverse Engineering

Abstract

Surface reconstruction is a classical task 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 and the resulting point cloud is then fitted through mathematical surfaces via numerical optimization. The choice of the approximating functions is crucial for the accuracy of the process. Unfortunately, real-world objects often require complex nonlinear approximating functions, which are not well suited for standard numerical optimization methods. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by using a cuckoo search algorithm with Lévy flights, a swarm intelligence technique envisioned for global optimization. The method is applied to three illustrative examples of point clouds fitted by using a combination of exponential, polynomial and logarithmic functions. The experimental results show that the method performs well in recovering the shape of the point clouds accurately. We conclude that the method is promising towards its application to manufactured workpieces in real industrial settings.