Advanced Laser Scanning Techniques for Reverse Engineering of Cultural Heritage Artefacts

Reverse Engineering (RE) can be defined as the process of duplicating an existing part, subassembly or product, without drawings, documentation or a computer model. Today, RE is widely employed for applications in areas as diverse as manufacturing engineering, industrial design and cultural heritage. As regards the latter field, the use of RE procedures for tangible cultural heritage can be developed for several purposes such as reproduction, computer-aided repair, virtual museums, and artefact condition monitoring. A great number of RE systems, based on various contact and non contact sensing devices (mechanical, optical, laser and ultrasonic based sensors), have been developed and utilised. Digital data acquisition, i.e. the first stage of the RE procedure, is a critical phase as the choice of the detection methodology can affect the quality of the point cloud and, consequently, the resulting surface reconstruction or CAD model creation.