LASER AND MULTI-IMAGE REVERSE ENGINEERING SYSTEMS FOR ACCURATE 3D MODELLING OF COMPLEX CULTURAL ARTEFACTS

Abstract. The recent scientific and technical developments of reverse engineering methods and tools have broadened the possibilities of applications in the field of cultural heritage conservation. In this paper, two different non-contact reverse engineering systems were utilized for 3D data acquisition of a cultural heritage artefact. The object of interest is a 17th century wooden engraved ecclesiastical sanctuary ciborium. The requirement of the 3D model is to aid the art conservators for the preservation of the wooden material and the restoration of small damages and cracks in the engraved parts, thus requiring accuracy of the model in the order of sub-millimetre. In this work, a Faro Vantage laser tracker was employed along with the FARO Edge Arm. In addition, image-based modelling was also implemented with a large number of overlapping images acquired with a Canon EOS 6D camera and processed using the well-known Structure from Motion (SfM) method with an auto-calibration procedure. The digital data acquisition and processing procedures of the scanned geometry are described and compared to evaluate the performance of both systems in terms of data acquisition time, processing time, reconstruction precision and final model quality. Whilst models produced with laser scanning and image-based techniques is not a novel approach, the combination of laser tracking and photogrammetric data still presents limited documentation in the field of cultural artefact documentation mainly due to the extremely high cost of the laser tracking systems.