A collaboration between the Energy Environment and Water Research Center and the Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center of The Cyprus Institute has been established with the aim of combining techniques, methodologies, and software analysis from the respective fields so as to characterize the optical surface of a heliostat. Both imaging and range-based approaches were used to obtain the raw data, resulting in a point cloud describing the surface of the heliostat.

The heliostats were surveyed with both techniques in two positions, with the four point clouds being placed online for comparison. After suitable post-processing, the resulting surface was imported into a ray-tracing software. A favorable agreement between the visual image of energy distribution on a flat target and the equivalent distribution obtained from ray-tracing of the measured surface is found, demonstrating that the proposed techniques are suitable for the optical characterization of heliostats.