Research on an Intelligent Identification and Classification Method of Complex Holes in Triangle Meshes for 3D Printing

Abstract

In triangular mesh models, the repair of complex hole poses a difficult problem, which always causes serious repair defects. Therefore, it is needed to develop an intelligent identification and classification method of complex holes to reduce repair difficulties. First, the topological structure of the complex hole is studied and all the holes are divided into single holes and continuous holes depending on whether there are intersection points. Second, to tackle the nesting and connecting of complex continuous holes, a decomposition method of multiply connected domains based on intersection points is proposed to partition or reconstruct complex continuous holes into single holes. Based on the different geometric structures, single holes are classified into five common hole types and a corresponding identification method of single holes is presented. Finally, an experiment is carried out to verify the repair quality and efficiency of the proposed method. Compared with Geomagic software, the proposed method can automatically identify and partition complex holes with fewer defects and similar efficiency. It can reduce the difficulties of repairing complex holes and enable the repair of complex holes based on existing methods. It is shown that the method can be applied to complex hole repair of 3D printing models without the participation of technicians.