The key issues such as vision sensor, sampling planning are studied for reverse engineering. For the developed sensor, the low sensitivity to the incident angle and the high linearity between the output and the input are carried out. During digitizing, the adaptive sampling planning method based on the curvature of surface and the slope of tangent line of measured point is proposed. After integrating the vision sensor, CNC milling and relevant software, the reverse engineering system based on computer vision is developed. The experiment shows that this system is reliable and efficient.