This article describes a new approach to build three-dimentional
models of the broken pieces of relics.
The shapes of the front face and the back face of a broken piece are
first digitized with a laser range finder. Then the points on the back
face of the piece that touch the horizontal plane where the piece is
put on when measuring the shape of its front face are determined from
digitized back face surface, which are then used to merge the shape
data of the front face and the back face.
In order to generate a virtual piece, the texture image is taken from
a 3CCD digital video camera, which are then mapped on the build 3D
shape model to generate CG images.