Abstract: The contour tiling problem in object surface reconstructionwas transformed to a problem of searching for an optimal path in a directed graph. An improved generic algorithm (GA) was proposed to solve the objective functions related to the contour tiling problem. The improvements on initial population, crossover and mutation were made to the conventional GA to ensure any individual to present a valid resolution. The result of an example shows that the proposed algorithm is simple and feasible, with better performances in optimization, convergence speed and robustness compared with simulated annealing for contour tiling.