Reverse Engineering can be defined as the process wherein a device’s, object’s, or system’s technological principles are discovered by analyzing its operation, function, and structure. It often refers to detaching something, say- a software program, electronic equipment, or mechanical device and carrying out the analysis of its workability in detail. This is done in order to manufacture a new program or device which performs the same function without doubling anything from original.
Motivation: Reasons behind the emergence of reverse engineering include interoperability, lost documentation which means loss or non-existence of documentation of the concerned device, product analysis, security auditing, exclusion of protection of copy, circumvention of restrictions regarding access, and fraud.
‘Reverse Engineering’ of ‘mechanical devices’ : With the ever-increasing popularity of CAD, ‘reverse engineering’ has proven to be a blessing for creation of ‘3D virtual model’ of the on hand physical part to be used in 3D CAE, CAM, CAD and many other soft wares. The measuring of physical object can be done by making use of ‘#D scanning technologies’ such as computed tomography, ‘structured light digitizers’, laser scanners, and CMMs. The data that is measured usually gets represented as ‘point cloud’. It is devoid of topological information. That’s why, the processing and modelling takes place into usable format like a ‘triangular faced mesh’, CAD model, or a collection of surfaces of NURBS. Applications such as Polyworks, Image ware, Geomagic, or Rapidform are used for processing the ‘point clouds’ into the formats that can be used in applications like 3D CAE, CAM, CAD or visualization.