Enhanced STL

STL format is widely used as a de facto industry standard in the rapid prototyping industry due to its simplicity and robustness. However, on account of its shortcomings and inadequacy in applications, many interface alternatives have been brought forward. In this paper, a new scheme is proposed to enhance the approximation accuracy and to extend functions of STL by means of introducing additional feature and attribute codes into STL format. The geometry feature code describes a tetrahedron based on the STL triangular facet, which provides better approximation to the object surface covering. The attribute code attaches attributes of object surfaces such as colours and markers to STL triangular facets. Moreover, the enhanced STL also shares the structure of binary STL format by filling feature and attribute codes into its blanks, and therefore is compatible with STL. Compared with STL, the enhanced STL provides not only higher accuracy with the same file size and compatible format, but also colour and marker functions for rapid prototyping.