Interventions for statues restoration may last long periods, involving several activities from material and structural analysis to reconstruction of fragments and set-up of museum exhibitions. Concerning reconstruction of fragments, with the passing of the years some maintenance o new set-up may occur due to different kind of instances. They can be related to new findings, new reconstruction criteria (e.g. showing the unknown parts with different materials); problems of the methods applied for reconstructions (e.g. shrinkage of the resin); accidents or disasters (e.g. earthquake). Reverse engineering techniques and CAD modeling may help restores for a better understanding of the problems and related results, while automatic feature recognition and image analysis may support fast evaluation of fragments edges. In this research we aim to analyze and implement routines for CAD that are devoted to recompose fragments acquired by a shape scanner. In addition, considering cases which have image proofs of previous integrity and alignment (e.g. recent damage due to accidents or misalignments due to material deterioration), the proposed alignment found by CAD will be compared and improved through a quantitative comparison of the image proof, through a procedure based on image registration.
The proposed research accomplishes many requests present at the moment. It can be seen as an application of the general topic "free surface modeling" and "feature recognition", where many different approaches are still present according to the field of the related application (bioengineering, mechanical, computer graphics and computer vision, ...).
In particular, it faces the problem of recognition of fragments in 3D artifacts where alignment criteria have to be found according to hypoheses related to a posture configuration and measurement analysis of the shape, rather than to image interpretation.
Moreover it has many relevant consequence in the field of the cultural heritage. In fact it can be adopted for integrity reconstruction after accidents (e.g. earthquakes) or for evaluating different hypotheses of posture. In other word it can be seen as a Computer Aided Tool for restores and reasearchers that have to work with fragmented and incomplete statues.
Finally the validation through image registration, when old photos of the intact artifact exists, gives the opportunity of applying the method, as a previsional tool, in structural cases where defect of the inner support of the statue or shrinkage of the materials may ruin the posture.