Abstract:
The work in this thesis has been dedicated to the subject of reverse engineering techniques
using soft computing techniques. It particularly emphasizes on the problems of curve fitting
for finding the optimal solutions. A detailed survey has been provided, in the literature
review, on the subject reported by various authors (see [1-105] in Chapter 1). Although
people have worked to find the direct methods for problem solving, yet an extensive study is
needed for indirect solutions using heuristic like approaches. In this thesis, new reverse
engineering techniques are proposed which utilize three soft computing approaches including
Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Imperialist Competitive
Algorithm (ICA). Spline functions have also been used to find the optimal solutions for curve
fitting problems. These soft computing techniques are used to find the optimal values of
shape parameters in the description of the proposed spline functions. The underlying methods
of reverse engineering consist of several phases including data extraction of image outlines,
detection of corner points, and fitting curve using spline functions to the detected corner
points. A total of nine algorithms have been designed and implemented. These algorithms are
formulated to explain the process of reverse engineering. The proposed schemes help
vectorizing the generic shapes and are demonstrated with various practical examples. The
examples presented illustrate very well the outcomes and the robustness of the proposed
algorithms. The comparisons of the proposed schemes are made with each other as well as
with some existing schemes in the literature.
