Fabrication-Aware Reverse Engineering for Carpentry

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fabrication-aware reverse engineering method that generates editable, accurate blueprints of carpentered objects from images, leveraging domain-specific constraints for improved 3D reconstruction and fabrication readiness.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach that incorporates fabrication constraints into image-based 3D reconstruction, enabling the creation of semantically valid, editable models suitable for fabrication and customization.

Findings

Successfully reconstructs accurate, editable 3D models from images.

Enables fabrication of physical replicas and customized designs.

Produces models that are both easy to edit and faithful to the original objects.

Abstract

We propose a novel method to generate fabrication blueprints from images of carpentered items. While 3D reconstruction from images is a well-studied problem, typical approaches produce representations that are ill-suited for computer-aided design and fabrication applications. Our key insight is that fabrication processes define and constrain the design space for carpentered objects, and can be leveraged to develop novel reconstruction methods. Our method makes use of domain-specific constraints to recover not just valid geometry, but a semantically valid assembly of parts, using a combination of image-based and geometric optimization techniques. We demonstrate our method on a variety of wooden objects and furniture, and show that we can automatically obtain designs that are both easy to edit and accurate recreations of the ground truth. We further illustrate how our method can be used to fabricate a physical replica of the captured object as well as a customized version, which can be produced by directly editing the reconstructed model in CAD software.