Fabrication‐Aware Reverse Engineering for Carpentry

• Published in: Computer graphics forum Vol. 40; no. 5; pp. 301 - 314
• Main Authors: Noeckel, James, Zhao, Haisen, Curless, Brian, Schulz, Adriana
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.08.2021
• Subjects: Carpentry; Image reconstruction; Optimization; Optimization techniques; Reverse engineering
• ISSN: 0167-7055; 1467-8659
• DOI: 10.1111/cgf.14375

We propose a novel method to generate fabrication blueprints from images of carpentered items. While 3D reconstruction from images is a well‐studied problem, typical approaches produce representations that are ill‐suited for computer‐aided design and fabrication applications. Our key insight is that fabrication processes define and constrain the design space for carpentered objects, and can be leveraged to develop novel reconstruction methods. Our method makes use of domain‐specific constraints to recover not just valid geometry, but a semantically valid assembly of parts, using a combination of image‐based and geometric optimization techniques. We demonstrate our method on a variety of wooden objects and furniture, and show that we can automatically obtain designs that are both easy to edit and accurate recreations of the ground truth. We further illustrate how our method can be used to fabricate a physical replica of the captured object as well as a customized version, which can be produced by directly editing the reconstructed model in CAD software.