One of the activities carried out at the lab over the years has been to use 3D range cameras to perform the reverse engineering of free form shapes, in view of establishing a method for the achievement of topological informations of the shapes in the form of meshes. The transversal nature of the process has led to apply it  to a large field of applications. This page briefly reports the experiences carried out in (i) crime scene documentation, (ii) medicine, (iii) cultural heritage, and (iv) automotive applications.

All the examples share the common objective of producing a metrologically consistent description of the target  surfaces, for documentation, visualization, measurement and reproduction. The quality of the models is determined by the measurement performances of the 3D sensor, the errors introduced by the alignement and the editing of the meshes, and the ability of the operator. In all the study cases ,very high precision has been obtained, and a good compromise between the adherence of the models to the original surfaces and theoperator time.

For very high precision, which is necessary in precision mechanics, a combination between optical and contact sensors has beed explored, and validated. This research is documented in this page.