ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the so-called three-dimensional (3D) scanning pipeline. It focuses on the geometric processing tasks that have to be applied to raw 3D scanned data to transform them into a clean and complete 3D model, and how 3D scanning technology should be used for the acquisition of real artifacts. The chapter describes the software processing, the pitfalls of current solutions, and highlights some topics of interest for future research, according to their experience and sensibility. The acquisition in a single shot of a much larger extent is supported by devices that employ the so-called time-of-flight (TOF) approach. TOF systems send a pulsed light signal towards the surface and measure the time elapsed until the reflection of the same signal is sensed by an imaging device. The basic approach, acquiring just the so-called apparent color and mapping those samples to the 3D model, is still widely used in most of the practical cases.
