New technologies, especially scanning and reconstruction, in two and three dimensions are currently gaining interest in various fields of application like industry, forensics, and cultural heritage. There it is necessary to reconstruct objects
from its pieces in order to answer certain questions like how the object was constructed, why it broke exactly that way, or what information the object contained in the original state.
The first step in this process is to get relevant information from the object by scanning it in 2D, 3D or both. The quality of the data gathered influences the virtual reconstruction process which is based on finding correspondences between the single pieces. Together with model-based assumptions of the object it is possible to solve these two- or three dimensional puzzles. This presentation gives a short review
on techniques for 2D and 3D scanning of objects on the example of cultural heritage preservation and shows how this information can then be used together with model- based
assumptions of the object to reconstruct the object from pieces. The “Sinaitic Glagolitic Sacramentary Fragments”, a palimpsest documentation and reconstruction project, the “Stasi Files”, a reconstruction project on hand torn documents, an archaeological ceramic reconstruction project and an archaeological marble plate reconstruction project will serve as case studies to show algorithms developed in order
to solve the puzzling problem.