Today, it has become more frequent and reasonably easy to digitize the surface of 3D objects. However, the obtained results are often inaccurate and noisy. In this paper, we present an efficient method to analyze a curvature histogram from a digitized 3D surface using a real object. Moreover, we propose to use the curvature histogram analysis for many steps of a reverse engineering process, which can be used to retrieve a CAD model from a digitized one for example. Our objective is to design a fast and fully automated method, which is seldom seen in reverse engineering. Experimental results applied on digitized 3D meshes show the efficiency and the robustness of our proposed method.