MiCADangelo: Fine-Grained Reconstruction of Constrained CAD Models from 3D Scans
This addresses the need for precise, editable CAD models in manufacturing and product development, representing a novel advancement rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of converting 3D scans into parametric CAD models with sketch constraints, a challenge in CAD reverse engineering, and introduces a method that outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by capturing fine-grained details and incorporating constraints for the first time.
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) plays a foundational role in modern manufacturing and product development, often requiring designers to modify or build upon existing models. Converting 3D scans into parametric CAD representations--a process known as CAD reverse engineering--remains a significant challenge due to the high precision and structural complexity of CAD models. Existing deep learning-based approaches typically fall into two categories: bottom-up, geometry-driven methods, which often fail to produce fully parametric outputs, and top-down strategies, which tend to overlook fine-grained geometric details. Moreover, current methods neglect an essential aspect of CAD modeling: sketch-level constraints. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to CAD reverse engineering inspired by how human designers manually perform the task. Our method leverages multi-plane cross-sections to extract 2D patterns and capture fine parametric details more effectively. It enables the reconstruction of detailed and editable CAD models, outperforming state-of-the-art methods and, for the first time, incorporating sketch constraints directly into the reconstruction process.