Visualization of deviations between different geometries using a multi-level voxel-based representation

Abstract

We present an approach for visualizing deviations between a 3d printed object and its digital twin. The corresponding 3d visualization for instance allows to highlight particularly critical sections that indicate high deviations along with corresponding annotations. Therefore, the 3d printing thus needs to be reconstructed in 3d, again. However, since the original 3d model that served as blueprint for the 3d printer typically differs topology-wise from the 3d reconstructed model, the corresponding geometries cannot simply be compared on a per-vertex basis. Thus, to be able to easily compare two topologically different geometries, we use a multi-level voxel-based representation for both data sets. Besides using different appearance properties to show deviations, a quantitative comparison of the voxel-sets based on statistical methods is added as input for the visualization. These methods are also compared to determine the best solution in terms of the shape differences and how the results differ, when comparing either voxelized volumes or hulls. The application VoxMesh integrates these concepts into an application and provides the possibility to save the results in form of voxel-sets, meshes and point clouds persistently, that can either be used by third party software or VoxMesh to efficiently reproduce and visualize the results of the shape analysis.