Reverse engineering of CAD models via clustering and approximate implicitization

In applications like computer aided design, geometric models are often represented numerically as polynomial splines or NURBS, even when they originate from primitive geometry. For purposes such as redesign and isogeometric analysis, it is of interest to extract information about the underlying geometry through reverse engineering. In this work we develop a novel method to determine these primitive shapes by combining clustering analysis with approximate implicitization. The proposed method is automatic and can recover algebraic hypersurfaces of any degree in any dimension. In exact arithmetic, the algorithm returns exact results. All the required parameters, such as the implicit degree of the patches and the number of clusters of the model, are inferred using numerical approaches in order to obtain an algorithm that requires as little manual input as possible. The effectiveness, efficiency and robustness of the method are shown both in a theoretical analysis and in numerical examples implemented in Python

Trivariate Spline Representations for Computer Aided Design and Additive Manufacturing

Digital representations targeting design and simulation for Additive Manufacturing (AM) are addressed from the perspective of Computer Aided Geometric Design. We discuss the feasibility for multi-material AM for B-rep based CAD, STL, sculptured triangles as well as trimmed and block-structured trivariate locally refined spline representations. The trivariate spline representations support Isogeometric Analysis (IGA), and topology structures supporting these for CAD, IGA and AM are outlined. The ideas of (Truncated) Hierarchical B-splines, T-splines and LR B-splines are outlined and the approaches are compared. An example from the EC H2020 Factories of the Future Research and Innovation Actions CAxMan illustrates both trimmed and block-structured spline representations for IGA and AM.Comment: 30 pages, 14 figures. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 68044

Binary segmentation of medical images using implicit spline representations and deep learning

We propose a novel approach to image segmentation based on combining implicit spline representations with deep convolutional neural networks. This is done by predicting the control points of a bivariate spline function whose zero-set represents the segmentation boundary. We adapt several existing neural network architectures and design novel loss functions that are tailored towards providing implicit spline curve approximations. The method is evaluated on a congenital heart disease computed tomography medical imaging dataset. Experiments are carried out by measuring performance in various standard metrics for different networks and loss functions. We determine that splines of bidegree $(1,1)$ with $128\times128$ coefficient resolution performed optimally for $512\times 512$ resolution CT images. For our best network, we achieve an average volumetric test Dice score of almost 92%, which reaches the state of the art for this congenital heart disease dataset.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure

Real-time processing of high-resolution video and 3D model-based tracking for remote towers

High quality video data is a core component in emerging remote tower operations as it inherently contains a huge amount of information on which an air traffic controller can base decisions. Various digital technologies also have the potential to exploit this data to bring enhancements, including tracking ground movements by relating events in the video view to their positions in 3D space. The total resolution of remote tower setups with multiple cameras often exceeds 25 million RGB pixels and is captured at 30 frames per second or more. It is thus a challenge to efficiently process all the data in such a way as to provide relevant real-time enhancements to the controller. In this paper we discuss how a number of improvements can be implemented efficiently on a single workstation by decoupling processes and utilizing hardware for parallel computing. We also highlight how decoupling the processes in this way increases resilience of the software solution in the sense that failure of a single component does not impair the function of the other components