CONE VISIBILITY DECOMPOSITION OF FREEFORM SURFACES

We present a scheme to preplan the set of viewing directions that are necessary to Laser scan a freeform surface. A Laser scanner is limited by the orientation of the normal of the scanned surface and a large d eviation from the normal direction can hinder the ability to detect th e reflected ray of the Laser. In this work, we present a freeform surf ace decomposition into regions, so that each region can be properly sc anned from a prescribed viewing direction. The union of all these free form surface regions forms a coverage of the entire original surface. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.