Abstract: Geometric model is one of the foundations of advanced manufacturing technology. And, reverse engineering (RE) is an important aspect for geometric modeling of products, especially for products with complex surface. The technique of surface modeling of complex surface in RE is studied systematically. A feature-based scheme on surface modeling is presented. In this scheme, there include 4 steps. Firstly, the digital data is pre-processed so that noise in it is filtered and topological relations between points are built up. In the second step, shape features are extracted from the digital data, and the surface is divided into several blocks according features extracted. And in the following step, surface models are reconstructed for every block. Finally, sub – surface models in relation to blocks are merged to generate an overall smooth model.

Key words: Complex surface, Feature, Geometric modeling, Reverse engineering