An intelligent in-situ visual inspection system for preventive conservation of cultural heritages

Abstract

Preventive conservation is an advanced protection scheme that is widely recognized and constantly pursued by the worldwide conservation community of cultural heritages. Following the minimum interruption principle, preventive protection can effectively inhibit the deterioration of cultural relics by finely inspecting the symptoms, inferring the causes of diseases, and accurately controlling relevant pathogenesis factors. Reliable inspection of symptoms is the starting point and basis of preventive conservation. At present, many technologies and data have been accumulated for environmental factors. Despite the plenty techniques and accumulated data for the perception of environmental factors, the feasible, accurate, and reliable in-situ inspection of the status of cultural heritages still remains an open problem due to slow changing speed, subtle change scale, and versatile occurrence environments, which seriously hinders the development and promotion of preventive protection. In this paper, we present the first intelligent in-situ visual inspection system for the preventive conservation of cultural heritages. By physically reproducing the cameras 6-DoF pose, effective image-guided detection of fine-grained changes for cultural heritages is realized. Till now, this system has been used in more than 10 cultural heritage sites in China, such as the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes, the Imperial Palace, and the Summer Palace.