A new partitioning process for geometrical product specifications and verification

In ISO Geometrical Product Specifications and Verification Standards (GPS), Feature operations are used to obtain ideal and non-ideal features. The formalization of such operations enables to reduce ambiguity and uncertainty within the activities of design, manufacture and metrology of mechanical products, and their scientific investigation contributes to develop a sound mathematical framework and formalisms for the comprehension of engineering practices and the development of new standards. Partitioning is a fundamental operation defined in ISO GPS standard which aims at decomposing a part into independent features or surface portions for further processing and analysis. In this paper, a state-of-the-art survey of partitioning and segmentation methods and techniques reported in the literature is conducted and a comprehensive classification is proposed. Thereafter, a new partitioning process is developed for partitioning into regions and recognizing each region as one of the seven invariance classes of surfaces. It proceeds in three main steps: initial partitioning based on shape index and curvedness, refined partitioning by slippage analysis and invariance class recognition by statistical evaluation. An intuitive shape color wheel is defined to visualize the partitioned features according to their corresponding invariance classes. Experiments and results on both nominal models and measured point clouds are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.