A Fast Hole-Filling Method for Triangular Mesh in Additive Repair

• Main Authors: Chao Feng, Jin Liang, Maodong Ren, Gen Qiao, Wang Lu, Shifan Liu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-02-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: hole filling; additive manufacturing; repair; minimum area triangulation; advancing front
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/3/969

In the triangular meshes obtained in additive repair, it is a challenge to find one single hole-filling method to close all holes and make the filling patches assort with surrounding meshes well with low time complexity, which is mainly caused by the shape complexity and size difference of the various holes, especially in the fields of intelligent manufacturing, 3D measurement, and reverse engineering. Therefore, it is reasonable to adopt different algorithms to fill different types of holes. In this research, a fast hole-filling method for triangular mesh is proposed based on the hole size. First, a group of basic concepts is defined to make them uniform throughout the whole text, followed by the descriptions of hole detection and boundary cleaning. Second, three different algorithms are developed to fill the small-sized, middle-sized, and large-sized holes classified by hole size respectively, which can fill all the detected holes in a fast and proper manner. Finally, two experiments are carried out to verify the efficiency, robustness, and ability to recover the shape of our method. Compared to two state-of-the-art hole-filling methods in the first experiment, the quantitative evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed method is much faster than them with the ability to guarantee the regularity of most filling triangles. The second experiment proves that our method can produce satisfactory filling results by making the filling patches be compatible with surrounding meshes well.