Diverse Non Contact Reverse Engineering Systems for Cultural Heritage Preservation

Reverse Engineering (RE) is the process of duplicating an existing part, subassembly or product, without drawings, documentation or a computer model. RE is widely employed for applications in areas as diverse as manufacturing engineering, industrial design and cultural heritage. As regards the latter, the use of RE for tangible cultural heritage can be developed for purposes such as reproduction, computer-aided repair, virtual museums, and artefact condition monitoring. Digital data acquisition, i.e. the first stage of the RE procedure, is critical as the choice of the detection methodology can affect the quality of the point cloud and the resulting surface reconstruction or CAD model creation. In this paper, two non contact RE laser systems, respectively based on a coordinate measuring machine and a portable 3D scanning device, are utilised for data acquisition and digital reconstruction of an antique porcelain sculpture of complex geometry to comparatively assess the RE systems performance.