DeFillet: Detection and Removal of Fillet Regions in Polygonal CAD Models

Filleting is a fundamental operation in CAD systems, akin to a ball rolling between two adjacent surface patches, resulting in a seamless connection. The reverse process, which we refer to as DeFillet in this paper, is crucial for CAE analysis and secondary design phases. However, it presents significant challenges, particularly when the input data originates from surface reconstruction or discretization processes. Our DeFillet algorithm is inspired by the observation that the rolling-ball center defines an osculating sphere, while the Voronoi diagram of surface samples provides sufficiently many rolling-ball center candidates. By leveraging this insight, we compute a transformation between the Voronoi vertices and the surface samples, enabling the efficient identification of fillet regions. Subsequently, we formulate the reconstruction of sharp features as a quadratic optimization problem. Our method's effectiveness has been validated through extensive testing using self-constructed models and 100 filleted models selected from the Fusion 360 Gallery dataset. The code for this paper is publicly available at https://github.com/xiaowuga/DeFillet.