Heterogeneous object slicing with geometric contour constraint

Slicing contour generation for geometric model is a vital process in rapid prototyping manufacturing. When slicing a heterogeneous object (HO), we take into account not only the geometric slicing but also the gradient material information. In this paper, we develop a new method to slice a heterogeneous object where the geometric contours are taken as constraints to resample the heterogeneous information through pixel overlap interpolation and tri-linear interpolation, which can maintain the original heterogeneous material information as much as possible and the slicing boundary as accurate as possible. The novelty of our method is that the gradient material resampling with geometry constraint can guarantee the crisp boundary of the HO slices when the gradient information is converted for geometric space to image space. Experimental results validate that our method can create heterogeneous object slices with more accurate boundary than simple interpolation scheme.